Jesse Waters: Musk retweets it, Rogan podcasts it, Fox broadcasts it. By the time it reaches everybody, millions have seen it.

Micah Loewinger: DOGE talking points are taking a familiar route across the right-wing web. From WNYC New York, this is On the Media. I'm Micah Loewinger. Also on this week's show, Silicon Valley has often been considered a liberal force, but its reactionary roots go way back.

Becca Lewis: Oh, quasi-authoritarian politics has been there all along, the idea that technology can bring us into the future by restoring an older social order through these charismatic, powerful men.

Micah Loewinger: Plus, as the new administration cuts federal funding for museums, archives, and libraries, a look at the untold history of how scholars helped win World War II.

Elise Graham: The library is full of sports, but none of those stories are about spies in the library.

Micah Loewinger: It's all coming up after this.

Brooke Gladstone: From WNYC in New York, this is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. For weeks now, Democrats in Congress in state houses and at rallies have repudiated the actions of this new administration.

Democrat: Are you guys watching this? We have a private takeover of the federal government that is being labeled reform. It is clearly in violation of a number of federal laws.

Democrat: Elon Musk is seizing the power that belongs to the American people. We are here to fight back.

Democrat: You mean to tell me a man worth over $400 billion is going to decide what happens with my grandma's Social Security check?

Democrats: No.

Micah Loewinger: The question is, as ever, who are they reaching?

Jesse Waters: We are waging a 21st-century information warfare campaign against the left and they are using tactics from the 1990s.

Micah Loewinger: Earlier this week, Jesse Waters on Fox News offered a lacerating breakdown of how the Democrats have managed their messaging.

Jesse Waters: They are holding tiny press conferences, tiny little rallies. They're screaming into the ether on MSNBC. What you're seeing on the right, it's like grassroots guerrilla warfare. Someone says something on social media. Musk retweets it, Rogan podcasts it, Fox Broadcasts. By the time it reaches everybody, millions of people have seen it.

Micah Loewinger: Waters is onto something. Consider this storyline taken up by the president.

President Donald Trump: We're going to go into Fort Knox to make sure the gold is there. You know that we're going to go into Fort Knox. Do you know about that?

Micah Loewinger: Donald Trump speaking with reporters on Air Force One Wednesday.

President Donald Trump: If the gold isn't there, we're going to be very upset.

Micah Loewinger: Why is the president bracing us for potentially pilfered gold reserves? Perhaps because last Saturday, Zero Hedge, a far-right account, posted on X, "It would be great If Elon Musk could take a look inside Fort Knox just to make sure the 4,580 tons of US gold is there. Last time anyone looked was 50 years ago in 1974." Musk replied, "Surely it's reviewed every year." Zero Hedge followed up, "It should be. It isn't."

All right. This morning to talk about going for the gold, Elon Musk and DOGE setting their sights on the country's largest Gold reserve, Fort Knox in Kentucky.

Micah Loewinger: Fox News a couple days later.

Fox News Anchor: Kentucky Senator Rand Paul joins us now.

Senator Rand Paul: I've been trying to go down and see the gold, make sure it's all there for about 10 years.

Micah Loewinger: From there, Breitbart, Alex Jones, and legions of Musk fanboys on X piled on.

Don O'Donnell: The question that everybody wants to know from the Treasury Department, is there actually still gold in Fort Knox?

Micah Loewinger: Right Wing Talk radio host Don O'Donnell interviewing Secretary of Treasury Scott Besant on Wednesday.

Scott Besant: We do an audit every year. The audit that ended the year September 30th, 2024, all the gold is present and accounted for.

Micah Loewinger: Of course, not even Trump's own cabinet member could squash the makings of a good conspiracy theory. After that interview, Musk continued posting on X that he would investigate Fort Knox himself and livestream the whole thing.

Joe Rogan: I appreciate the fact that Elon is so psychotic in his drive. It's bizarre and also in the face of overwhelming hate.

Micah Loewinger: Joe Rogan this week playing defense for Musk and DOGE with his guest, Mike Baker.

Mike Baker: Oh, my God. Everybody you would think would agree that. Oh, you're going to go through government spending with a fine tooth comb. You're going to find the waste and abuse and fraud. Fantastic.

Micah Loewinger: Fine tooth comb? After DOGE shared a list of government contracts that it had slashed, several news outlets reported that its claim that it had cut $55 billion worth of programs was wildly inaccurate. The largest cut, a contract DOGE said was worth $8 billion, was actually worth $8 million.

Will Oremus: He's using X as a propaganda machine.

Micah Loewinger: Washington Post technology reporter Will Oremus.

Will Oremus: That might sound a little extreme, but I think there's a reason I use that word. He's using his platform on X as essentially the communication strategy for DOGE. This ties in with Musk's consistent claim that the legacy media are outmoded and that X is the media now.

Micah Loewinger: Let's go through some examples of how Musk is using X to shape the narrative about DOGE and control the kinds of stories that are being reported in the Press. For instance, he recently made a claim about Reuters, the news organization and its relationship to the federal government.

Will Oremus: Yes, this isn't the most consequential of Musk's claims, but it's one that I think is really illustrative. Last week, the actor and director, Ron Howard, posted On X an article by the news agency, Reuters, that was headlined Musk's DOGE Cuts Based More on Political Ideology than Real Cost Savings so Far. Musk replied on X, "I wonder how much money Reuters is getting from the government. Let's find out."

Musk has built this coterie of followers and hangers-on On X that often spring into action. Those followers went out and started looking for evidence that Reuters is getting money from the government. One of them soon turned up what looked like a smoking gun. They had a screenshot of a government website that shows spending and contracts and it showed that Thomson Reuters Services was getting money from the US. Defense Department for a scope of work that included the phrase large-scale social deception.

Micah Loewinger: Large-scale social deception is like catnip for a conspiracy theorist, but also, what the hell is large-scale social deception? [chuckles]

Will Oremus: Well, you should ask what the hell is large-scale social deception, because that is the question that Musk himself appeared to not ask. Musk reposted the screenshot saying "Reuters was paid millions of dollars by the US Government for large-scale social deception." Well, my colleague at the Washington Post, Drew Harwell, started looking into this because that just sounded a little off.

Sure enough, it turns out that the contract was, A, it's not the news agency. It's this different branch of the Thomson Reuters parent company. B, the contract was for finding ways to defend against cyber attacks and in particular, a type of cyber attack that relies on social deception, tricking people into giving up credentials, that kind of thing.

Micah Loewinger: Just to be clear, another company owned by the Thomas Reuters conglomerate was contracted to do this work, but as you wrote in your piece, he's had a long-standing issue with the outlet.

Will Oremus: Yes. Reuters is not a left-wing outlet, which by the way, is how President Donald Trump later described it when he reposted Musk's claim. Reuters is a very down-the-middle objective news agency that has its stories picked up by news outlets around the world, but it has done investigative reporting on Musk and his companies that Musk has objected to in the past.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, Musk had also criticized Reuters for its award-winning investigation last year titled Musk Industrial Complex. In March he called the news agency the most deceptive news organization on Earth, which reminds me of Musk's recent targeting of Politico, an incorrect claim he made on X that the government is secretly funding the outlet. This conspiracy theory is a little hard to follow, so I'm going to ask for your help.

It began two weeks ago when Politico staff had received an email acknowledging that paychecks had not been delivered on time. The leadership of the organization said this is just a technical error, but users on X saw the reporting and thought that it was connected to the government's dismantling of USAID, which just happened to be happening at that same time in the news. How did this lead to Elon Musk saying that the government has a hand in funding Politico? Can you make this make sense?

Will Oremus: What was in fact happening was that the government agencies, including USAID, were paying for subscriptions to these Politico products that are really aimed at people in the policy world, these professional news products that update you on the minutiae of legislation moving through the subcommittees and who's proposing what bill at the state level.

Micah Loewinger: You're talking about Politico Pro.

Will Oremus: Yes, Politico Pro is their name for it, correct?

Micah Loewinger: Any of us could pay for it and read it, but it's so in the weeds that it's probably better for people who spend all of their day thinking and talking about policy.

Will Oremus: Yes, exactly. People in government understandably want to keep an eye on this stuff. Politico and several other outlets, including I think the Washington Post, my employer, does this, they charge extra for access to this kind of hyper-specialized information. Again, as with Reuters, not to say that these outlets never make mistakes or that there isn't bias.

There are always flaws in any media outlet's coverage, but Politico, and especially Politico Pro, this is a product that is explicitly designed to appeal to both Republicans and Democrats. This is not left-wing propaganda by any stretch of the imagination, but in the hands of the conspiracists on X and in the hands of Elon Musk, it becomes yet another example of how the government is secretly funding the liberal media to push lies to the American people.

Micah Loewinger: I want to ask you about another example that arose this week. We've seen Musk claiming to have discovered people of impossible ages on the books receiving Social Security benefits, saying, "Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security." What's going on there?

Will Oremus: You can see how this is becoming a template as Musk and DOGE target one agency after the next for cuts. There's always a claim that not only is there waste here, but there's this outrageous, obvious fraud going on that justifies the cuts. Apparently, the coding of the Social Security database is done in this ancient language called COBOL. I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly.

Micah Loewinger: Yes, it's 70 years old and it's used by the Social Security Administration. It's just stuck around.

Will Oremus: It has. There are some serious flaws in this programming language. One of them is that if somebody applies for Social Security without a birth date, they could get miscoded in the database as being 150 years old. Now, my colleague talked to experts on Social Security and they say, yes, this is a known issue.

In fact, back in 2015, the Social Security Agency put in place software that automatically cuts off any beneficiary at age 115 so that even if there is this mistake in the coding where somebody's birth date isn't in there and it might be misread as them being 150 years old, they're not going to actually be getting Social Security checks.

You can see how a quick glance at the Social Security database would make your eyebrows shoot up, "Oh my God, we're paying all these 150-year-olds." The issue is just lack of curiosity as to why that might be, other than just leaping immediately to the conclusion that it's this horrific waste or fraud or abuse that no one before you has ever noticed or thought to do anything about.

Micah Loewinger: As Elon Musk gains access to critical government databases, he has both the opportunity to set the narrative about the activities of these organizations and/or ask his supporters for help in coming up with narratives to seed into the conservative media to continue making a case for DOGE as a righteous cutter of government waste.

Will Oremus: That's exactly it. Alexander Howard, who is an author and open government advocate, called this "weaponized transparency." It's when you strategically disclose information in order to push an agenda or to intimidate people or sow division as opposed to actually trying to elucidate the issue.

We've seen this before from Musk with the Twitter files. This was an exercise shortly after he bought Twitter, where he invited some like-minded journalists and bloggers to comb through internal records from the company looking for evidence of collusion. It became this wonky reality show on X for a while where every night there would be a new installment of the stuff they had found that showed the liberal bias of Twitter's content moderators or how they were colluding with the FBI to censor Americans' information.

Some of it was true, and some of it was even troubling to people who really follow this stuff, but the vast majority of it actually had completely innocent explanations and there were very good reasons for it. This is basically the Twitter files playbook, but now they're running it on the US government.

Micah Loewinger: What, in your mind, can fact-based media and honest experts and civil servants do to combat what we're experiencing?

Will Oremus: Well, it's going to be hard now without getting all that secret funding from government.

Micah Loewinger: [laughs] Don't do that, Will.

[laughter]

Will Oremus: In seriousness, I think it's an uphill battle. Legacy media, as Musk calls it, is in fact losing influence. That has opened the field to all sorts of new actors. Some of it is good. People on social media call out biases that are real in the mainstream media, but it has also opened the field to conspiracy theorists, and grifters, and propagandists, and public figures who thrive on obscuring the truth and telling people that you cannot trust the fact based media.

Like so many of us, honestly, Musk seems to be being led these days by confirmation bias. That's a human impulse. We all do that. Social media really caters to it. Our personalized feeds exist to serve us, evidence that reinforces our worldview. The only counter to that, I think, is to slow down, consider the source, and don't leap to conclusions just because they feel true because sometimes the ones that feel the most true at first glance are the ones to be suspicious of.

Micah Loewinger: Will, thank you very much.

Will Oremus: Thanks, Micah.

Micah Loewinger: Will Oremus is a technology reporter for the Washington Post. His recent article is titled Musk Accused Reuters of Social Deception. The Deception was His.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, the right-wing roots of Silicon Valley.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media.

Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger. The head of DOGE is being lauded by right-wing commentators for bringing a startup mentality to his thwacking of government agencies.

Mike Huckabee: Elon Musk, I consider him with bringing in all those young geniuses. This is revenge of the nerds.

Micah Loewinger: Mike Huckabee, recently nominated by President Trump as ambassador to Israel, speaking with Sean Hannity earlier this week.

Mike Huckabee: These two incredible human beings who love this country, who have nothing to gain by what they're doing and everything to lose, and yet they're doing some things that will save this country, not just save it some money, that will save this country.

Micah Loewinger: Elon Musk is no stranger to fawning media coverage, but it used to come from legacy outlets and liberal elites.

Stephen Colbert: People have called you the real Tony Stark.

Micah Loewinger: Stephen Colbert interviewing Musk in 2015.

Stephen Colbert: Are you sincerely trying to save the world?

Elon Musk: Well, I'm trying to do good things, yeah.

Micah Loewinger: To the casual observer, Elon Musk has taken what seems to be a major pivot to the right, one we've seen echoed by his peers in Silicon Valley.

Reporter: Front and center at President Trump's inauguration, a lineup of billionaire tech titans led by the world's richest man, Elon Musk, sitting with Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, and Google's Sundar Pichai.

Becca Lewis: For a long time, there has been a certain form of liberal politics that has been really prominent in the Valley. Gay marriage absolutely is a big piece of it. So is lean-in style feminism promoted by Sheryl Sandberg.

Micah Loewinger: Becca Lewis is a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University.

Becca Lewis: What we saw at the Trump inauguration is a really conservative and at times, quasi-authoritarian politics that has traditionally been a minority of folks within Silicon Valley, but a very powerful minority.

Micah Loewinger: There is a narrative in the media now that this is a new right word turn for Silicon Valley, but in your research, you found that conservative thinkers were always there and even helped shape some of the fundamental politics of Silicon Valley, especially in the 1980s and 1990s. You've pointed to George Gilder in particular. What role did George Gilder play in the early days of the dot com boom?

Becca Lewis: George Gilder was one of the biggest evangelists of Silicon Valley. He ran arguably Silicon Valley's most successful investment newsletter. In the second half of the decade, there was this phenomenon named after him called the Gilder Effect, which basically meant if he endorsed a certain technology or stock, it immediately increased in value as his subscribers would go and invest in it.

He had gotten his start as a mentee of William F. Buckley, the godfather of modern conservatism. He had really made a name for himself in the 1970s as a provocative anti-feminist.

George Gilder: The female-headed families of today create an unending chain of burdens for tomorrow as their children disrupt classroom, fill the jails, throng the welfare rolls.

Becca Lewis: Then in the 1980s, he remade himself as a supply-side economics promoter.

George Gilder: The more I examined capitalism in anthropological terms, the more it became clear to me that capitalists give, and capitalists are people who are continually giving their wealth to others.

Becca Lewis: He became one of the biggest economic gurus of the first Reagan administration. There were stories of his book being on every desk at the OMB. He really determined that there was a crisis of masculinity happening and a crisis of the American nuclear family that was really caused by feminism, caused by women in the workplace, and caused by welfare programs.

He thought that the way out of this crisis of masculinity was entrepreneurship. He really helped create this cult of the entrepreneur in the 1980s that traveled really far and wide and became a part of the broader American mythos.

Micah Loewinger: So much of what you're saying feels familiar to this moment, especially this part you wrote, "Gilder claimed that entrepreneurs were better suited to lead the country into the future than the experts found in academia or government."

Becca Lewis: He specifically blamed the rise of feminism-- He talked about feminism's tyranny of credentials. Entrepreneurs were this answer to that problem, that they didn't have to have traditional education. They didn't have to have official roles in government. They were supposed to be these naturally genius men.

Micah Loewinger: How did the press at the time write about George Gilder and his ideas about entrepreneurship?

Becca Lewis: Even if wasn't articulating Gilder's exact ideas about feminism, they would still take the ideas about entrepreneurship at face value. They still ended up amplifying a lot of his ideas and really helping to turn certain entrepreneurs into the celebrities that we know today.

Micah Loewinger: One of these celebrities that was called a "Golden Geek" by Time Magazine on its cover in 1996 was Marc Andreessen. He was a part of a group of students at the University of Illinois who developed an early web browser called Mosaic. Then he went on to make a lot of money as co-founder of the Netscape web browser. He also started a big venture capital fund. You've said that Andreessen was, "the first entrepreneur who got the media treatment in the era of the World Wide Web."

Becca Lewis: He was what people called the first netrepreneur and entrepreneur of the net. There was already this media apparatus that was starting to become hungry for new success stories. You already had Steve Jobs, you already had Bill Gates, and now the media was looking for more and more success stories to be able to feature. Marc Andreessen provided that.

There was also a phenomenon happening in Silicon Valley where it was turning more and more away from hardware, which could take years and years to develop, and more and more towards software. There was a much quicker turnaround, and it meant that within a year or two of coming to Silicon Valley, Marc Andreessen was able to have an IPO, become a multimillionaire, and get this instantaneous media treatment that called him the next big thing. This was all before the age of 25.

Micah Loewinger: In 2023, he wrote the "Techno-Optimist Manifesto," in which he lays out a lot of his thinking and also a long list of people he calls patron saints. "Read the works of these people," he writes, "and you too will become a techno-optimist." On that list is George Gilder, who we just spoke about, Adam Smith, and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who was a founder of the Italian Futurist movement. Who were the Futurists, and why is it significant that one of their principal thinkers is being featured so prominently on Andreessen's reading list?

Becca Lewis: The Futurists were a really fascinating group of artists in Italy at the start of the 20th century who became really big supporters of Mussolini and Italian fascism. They embraced technology, and particularly automobiles, and they were obsessed with this idea of speed and modernity. They also very openly rejected the feminists, and they glorified war and violence.

It unsettles this assumption that we have in the United States that somehow technological progress must necessarily be linked to social progress. Fascist regimes in Italy and Germany specifically believed that new technologies could help restore older social orders.

In Germany, the new motorways, the Autobahn, was this hyper-modern thing that they also believed would help return German people to the countryside and come into contact more with the Volk history of Germany. Technology can be used as this way of enacting reactionary politics. I think that's what Andreessen is getting at here.

Micah Loewinger: After this last election, Barry Weiss, founder of the Free Press, interviewed Marc Andreessen on her podcast. In this interview, Andreessen says that there was a deal, a social compact between liberal elites and the tech ultra-rich, which was--

Marc Andreessen: Somebody like me basically start a company. Everybody would think that that was great. Then you could go public, you could make a lot of money. That was great. You would pay your taxes, and then at the end of your career, you be left with this giant pot of money. Then what you would do is donate it to philanthropy. Then, by the way, along the way, the press loves you.

Micah Loewinger: Then he says the deal between tech leaders and liberal politicians was broken.

Marc Andreessen: Basically, every single thing I just said is, for the last decade, has been now held to be presumptively evil. Just the whole idea that there are certain people who merit a greater economic outcome than others is itself evil. Technology, of course, is held to be presumptively evil. Tech companies are held to be presumptively evil.

Micah Loewinger: What do you make of this?

Becca Lewis: To a large degree, what he's saying is true that, in many ways, both the Clinton administration and the Obama administration were so keen to work together with Silicon Valley that they didn't have any interest in holding them accountable in any way, in regulating them in any way, or in questioning the underlying assumptions of the accumulation of this power.

It's easy not to have the reactionary streaks come out when everyone is agreeing that you should be the one running the world. It's easy to be this magnanimous face of generosity and the future. I think that the Democrats did start turning against Silicon Valley, particularly in the wake of Trump's election in 2016, and people started looking for answers around disinformation, starting to move away from seeing Silicon Valley's technologies as inherently good.

Then from there, you had the Biden administration start to turn towards regulation of technology. All of these things were, I think, very startling to people like Marc Andreessen.

Micah Loewinger: It wasn't just Democrats. Right-wing members of Congress supported antitrust investigations into these companies. We heard members from across the aisle talk about the potential effects of these Silicon Valley products on children and young people.

Do you think that the open embrace of President Trump from all of these tech billionaires is opportunistic because he's the guy who won, or do you think it's tech billionaires finally being honest about what they've been believing secretly for a long time now?

Becca Lewis: Andreessen did endorse him over the summer, along with his business partner, David Horowitz. They talked about wanting Trump in office because he would deregulate AI, because he would deregulate crypto, because he would lower capital gains taxes. A lot of them were supporting him beforehand. Of course, you have figures like Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook and others who I think are more belatedly supporting him. There ultimately are these shared reactionary resonances, this resentment towards feminism and the challenging of male power, this resentment towards what in the '90s was called multiculturalism, what now is being called DEI politics. I think that that also is allowing this shared coalition to be built.

Micah Loewinger: You quote tech journalist Michael Malone, who wrote in the '90s, "Forget digital Utopia. We could be headed for technofascism." This term "technofascist" feels a little bit strong for that time. Do you think it's useful and applicable for understanding this moment?

Becca Lewis: Now, I tend to shy away from using the term fascism, not because I don't think there's accuracies there, but because it is such a broad term and can refer to so many different things that it can lose a little bit of its precision. I've tended to refer to these sets of ideas as reactionary futurism, this set of ideas that technology can help bring us into the future by way of restoring an older social order.

I also think that techno-authoritarianism can be a useful way of talking about it because the way that they see that happening is through these kind of charismatic, individual, powerful men.

Micah Loewinger: Well, yes, help square this for me, because when I listen to and read Marc Andreessen, he sees technology as a force that will free people from authoritarianism. I don't see, in his worldview, any sense that he and these other tech leaders might be participating in authoritarianism.

Becca Lewis: Well, I think they have very different understandings about what authoritarianism is. The way that he or other tech folks talk about it is an overpowering regulating government that is authoritarian. It also refers to what they think of as the overpowering what they call wokeness or DEI. To them, that is authoritarianism.

I think that it's so fundamental in their viewpoint that they are the ones upsetting the norm, that they are naturally disruptors, they are naturally outside of the mainstream, that it's impossible to think that they are the ones being authoritarian.

Micah Loewinger: How does this history of conservatism in Silicon Valley help explain what Musk is doing right now?

Becca Lewis: The very culture of Silicon Valley since the '80s and '90s contained the seeds of what we are seeing now. Elon Musk is operating under the assumption that he is better suited to run the government than the people who have been working within the government for decades, that Silicon Valley and its way of doing things is better suited for America than federal departments are. No one elects a tech founder. The tech founder goes in and establishes himself. Elon Musk is taking these assumptions that are built into Silicon Valley culture and exploding them to the nth degree.

Micah Loewinger: Becca, thank you very much.

Becca Lewis: Thanks so much for having me.

Micah Loewinger: Becca Lewis is a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University and author of an article for the Guardian called 'Headed for technofascism': the rightwing roots of Silicon Valley.

Brooke Gladstone: Coming up, the librarian spies who helped win World War II.

Micah Loewinger: This is On the Media. This is On the Media. I'm Michael Loewinger.

Brooke Gladstone: I'm Brooke Gladstone. We're living in history all of the time. Nevertheless, sometimes seem more historic than others.

Reporter 1: Well, President Trump fired the head of the National Archives last night, keeping a campaign promise. That agency alerted the Justice Department in 2022 that Trump had potentially mishandled classified documents.

Reporter 2: The president signed an executive order that dissolved the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities.

Reporter 3: Trump has frozen all federal grant funding for libraries, museums and archives by rescinding Biden's Executive Order 14084.

Brooke Gladstone: Could there be more blatant examples of waste and fraud than museums and archives, libraries, humanities, or the arts? Oh, wait, academia. That's got to be worse, but history could tell us, if we chose to listen, that at times the very future of the world depended on those very institutions.

Historian Elise Graham, professor at Stony Brook University, has delved into the moment when the US government, staring into the abyss of World War II, was in desperate pursuit of historians, librarians, artists, and academics. It was a pursuit led by what was then called the Office of Strategic Services and later the CIA. Graham describes in her gripping history, Book and Dagger, how scholars became unlikely spies during World War II. She argues that without this unheralded core of peculiar recruits, that war might very well have been lost.

Elise Graham: The library is full of stories about spies, but none of those stories are about spies in the library.

Brooke Gladstone: [chuckles] You say that the war was won on the front lines, but it was won with books?

Elise Graham: We often think of World War II as the physicists' War. It was finally won by a bunch of physicists in New Mexico who dropped an atomic bomb. That, itself, was a successful misinformation campaign.

Brooke Gladstone: How so?

Elise Graham: In early 1945, a fellow named Henry DeWolf Smyth was called into an office in Washington and asked if he would write this book that was about a new kind of weapon that the US Was developing. It was published by Princeton University Press about a week after the bomb was dropped. It explained how the US made the bomb. It told the Oppenheimer story that you see in the movies where a group of shaggy-haired physicists figured out how to split the atom and all of this stuff.

The thing is, the physics of building an atomic bomb is in some respects the least important part. More important, if you actually want to make the thing explode, is the chemistry, the metallurgy, the engineering that were left out of the story. The book was published the way it was so that it would satisfy people's curiosity but not give other countries the information that you actually need to build a bomb.

It was a misinformation campaign, the very last one of the war, and the most successful because it still utterly dominates the way that we think about how the war was won. This wasn't just the physicists' war. It was also the historians' war, the book collectors' war, the artists' war, the professors' war. The war was fought on battlefields, but it was won in libraries.

Brooke Gladstone: We think of James Bond, we think of Jason Bourne, suave or brutal, but you show that the OSS's Research and Analysis Branch were recruiting people who were very different.

Elise Graham: These spies, these librarians and professors during World War II, they were chosen precisely because they would be overlooked. A lot of them went undercover, and nobody suspected them of being spies. Rumor has it that to this day, the CIA does recruiting at the annual American Library Association Conference.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Now, you touch on so many characters in your enthralling narrative, but there are three you return to again and again, Joseph Curtis, Sherman Kent, and Adele Kyber. Your book starts very cinematically with the recruitment of the very unlikely Curtis.

Elise Graham: People who were in charge of recruiting spies into the OSS at the beginning of the war drew on spy stories to tell them what to do. Someone came up to Curtis and said, "Listen, you need to go to the Yale Club in New York City tomorrow. Wear a purple tie. You're going to see a man who's smoking a cigarette. When he sees you, he'll put it out. He has an important message for you." That is how he got recruited.

Brooke Gladstone: Why Curtis in particular?

Elise Graham: Curtis was a professor of early modern literature. Curtis was the sort of guy who wouldn't be able to get the attention of a waiter. Students didn't remember him later on. If you're going to send someone behind enemy lines as a spy, it is useful that this is someone who nobody would look at twice, not the kind of guy who's wearing a tuxedo and everybody knows takes his martini shaken, not stirred.

Brooke Gladstone: Why was he assessed as having the right stuff?

Elise Graham: When you go undercover, it's important that you be as competent in your cover as you are in the spycraft. Joseph Curtis's cover was going to be he was going to Istanbul in order to collect books for the Yale Library, which meant he had to be competent in collecting books. Of course, in the meanwhile, he was tracking down German spies and turning them into double agents, but that's definitely not the thing you would expect someone like Joseph Curtis to be doing.

Brooke Gladstone: He was sent to supposedly neutral Istanbul just as whatever spying that was going on there by the Allies was falling apart?

Elise Graham: The OSS branch in Istanbul was falling apart because the guy in charge of it thought that he was in a James Bond story. He was sleeping with his sources, and his sources turned out to be enemy agents. His cover was blown so thoroughly that every time he walked into one of the city's nightclubs, the band would start playing a song called Boo Boo Baby, I'm a Spy.

Brooke Gladstone: [laughs]

[MUSIC- Wartime Istanbul: Boo Boo, Baby, I'm a Spy]

Singer: I’m so cocky I could swagger,

The things I know would make you stagger,

I’m 10% cloak and 90% dagger,

Boo, boo, baby, I’m a spy.

Elise Graham: That was letting McFarland criticize, actually tracked him down. He got tired of not being contacted. Maybe McFarland was hanging on to his own jobs by his fingernails. People were getting fired from the Istanbul outpost left and right.

Whatever the case, Curtis was given a surprising new job, which was to build a counterintelligence operation that would find enemy agents, turn them into double agents, and would also spread propaganda, rumors, misinformation he turned out to be surprisingly good at. I know that there's a lot of lying and backstabbing in academia, but this is something else altogether.

Brooke Gladstone: [chuckles] Tell me how these unlikely agents were trained.

Elise Graham: The Americans had these camps with tents in national parks where they would learn how to do quick draws like cowboys. You'd be standing in a muddy field and there would be a fighting instructor teaching you how to use ordinary objects as weapons. You'd learn how to use somebody's trousers to restrain him, or how to fold a newspaper in such a way that it turns into a deadly weapon. You would learn, if you're a woman, how to use a makeup compact as a knuckle duster. The assumption was that you'd be out in the field with only your wits to protect you.

Brooke Gladstone: I was really struck by the meticulous creation of persuasive pocket litter.

Elise Graham: As a general rule, you can have either a weapon or a cover, but not both because if the Gestapo catch you with a gun or a knife, you're not going to be able to persuade them that you're an ordinary civilian. Everything on your person, including the stuff in your pockets, should agree with your cover.

Your breath should smell like the toothpaste in the area that you're supposed to be from. If there are grains of tobacco in your pockets, they need to be tobacco that is sold in the place where you're from. It was really, really specific.

Brooke Gladstone: Let's move on to another notable character you return to again and again, Sherman Kent.

Elise Graham: Less Casper Milquetoast and more Humphrey Bogart, maybe. He was a tweed-wearing history professor at Yale. He was brilliant, but he was always looking for a fight. When he was teaching, he would throw chalk past the heads of his students, which they don't let us do anymore. If a student was yawning, he would throw the chalk right into the student's mouth.

When he gets recruited, he goes to a spy training camp. He learned how to throw daggers and he became so good at it. For the rest of his career he was famous for being able to "throw a dagger better than a Sicilian." That was the phrase that was said about him.

He didn't end up going into the field. He wound up going to Washington, where he worked in intelligence analysis, also known as the Chairborne division. This is professors of literature and history and economics who are pulling out of novels and newspapers strategic intelligence that can be used to fight the war, but all the work of those professors and librarians would have been nothing if Sherman Kent hadn't been their spokesman.

What he was trying to persuade the military of was that most of what an intelligence agency needs to know can come from public sources. Paper can be more effective than bombs. It could tell the right reader what factory should be bombed to stop the production of ball bearings. It's more useful to stop the production of ball bearings than to stop the production of fighter planes because ball bearings are used to create fighter planes. How do what factors? By comparing minute fluctuations in railroad rates. Then you find its address by looking at a street directory.

It was really adventurous and imaginative reading in the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress that allowed the Allies to come to these insights.

Brooke Gladstone: Now, talk about Adele Kyber.

Elise Graham: Kyber had, without knowing it, been trainng all of her life to be a spy. She had a PhD in classics from the University of Chicago. Because women couldn't really go into the professoriate in these years, she became a professional archive hunter, hopping from archive to archive across Europe, earning money by taking photographs of rare texts for scholars back home in the States.

Kyber became the most productive document acquisitions agent working for the Allies. She was working undercover in supposedly neutral Sweden. Sweden could continue to be neutral as long as no spies operated in Sweden so Kyber had to work completely undercover. The Swedish police had trained with the Gestapo. This was actually still a very dangerous place to be a spy. She acquired and sent home on microfilm a massive number of documents that went all over the world on behalf of the Allies, including into the library at a little place in New Mexico called Los Alamos.

Brooke Gladstone: In Adele, you actually have a movie spy. She used charm. She used guile. She also used the technique you described of saying something wrong in order to be mansplained the secret reality.

Elise Graham: Kaiber was aware that she was the woman who appealed to men who think two things at the same time. One, that they're attracted to smart women, and two, that they're smarter than the women they're attracted to, which is a very dangerous combination.

Kyber changed her Persona to suit the people that she was talking to. When she was trying to get documents from professors, "Oh, I myself got a PhD at the University of Chicago." When she talked to people who were sympathetic with the Germans, she seems to have represented herself as being sympathetic with the Germans. She reflected what they wanted.

Brooke Gladstone: You also found that a lot of other women who worked for the OSS were left out of these histories, and that was about 35% of the OSS. A lot of the work that these spies did revolved around changing the narrative. One very effective tactic involved "whispering."

Elise Graham: Whispering was a subspecialty of propaganda. Now, you might think that spreading rumors means talking as loudly and widely as possible, but that's not true. The coordination of loose lips had to be as tight as the coordination of special forces. I'll tell you how it worked.

The Allies put together rumors at something called the rumor factory. The head of this section had the enviable title Master Whisperer. The whispers would go out through strategic networks. In a given region a chief whisperer would organize the whispers, give them to agents. They would give them to sub-agents. Mostly sub-agents were ordinary civilians. You could be a reliable sub-agent in a propaganda network and not even know it.

The rumor factory classified whispers in two categories. One, smokescreen rumors that were designed to deceive the enemy about the Allied war position or the Allies intentionally. Two, rumors that were designed to attack the morale of the enemy. There's one that goes-- this is 1941 in Germany- a woman in black committed suicide with a revolver on the steps of the Reich Chancellery, which is Hitler's headquarters in Berlin. She held in her hand a newspaper announcing the death of her husband and son. This is to make people think about the despair of the German people.

Brooke Gladstone: Of course, one of the most famous coups pulled off by this corps of irregulars was Operation Mincemeat. British Intelligence dressed up a corpse as a Royal Marine to deceive the Germans about an upcoming invasion.

Elise Graham: Operation Mincemeat convinced the Germans to believe in a coincidence that was, on its face, ridiculous simply because it was a compelling story that this British Marine fell in the ocean carrying a suitcase of plans that showed the Allies planned to invade Greece instead of Sicily. The British worked up a whole background for this guy. He had pocket litter, he had a photograph of his fiancé, Pam, an overdraft slip from the bank showing he had spent too much on the engagement ring for Pam.

Brooke Gladstone: They dropped the corpse so that it would wash up in Spain.

Elise Graham: Whom the Germans trusted. They successfully laundered the operation into a trustworthy source, which was also done with whispers. If you could get a whisper printed in a small newspaper, then a big respectable newspaper would print that the small newspaper was saying it, and then suddenly it was respectable. This is something that tells us about how important it is to teach people how stories work.

Brooke Gladstone: Do we have that literacy about stories today? You say stories won the war, but the humanities now are under attack.

Elise Graham: Before the war, US libraries were underfunded. They had very thin collections compared to what was available in Europe. After the war, both university libraries and public libraries were invested in heavily by the US government, which was determined to never be caught so badly lacking again. The US had learned the value of libraries not just as centers of community and education, but as something that's integral to national security.

These are some of the lessons that the US self-consciously brought away from the war. Of course, 80 years have passed since then and we've largely forgotten that lesson.

Brooke Gladstone: In your book, you highlight the world-changing contributions of the people that Hitler despised, the members of the French resistance that destroyed critical railways that helped turn the war, and all the people that he rejected who wound up being responsible for turning the tide of the war.

Elise Graham: Yes. Hitler, he had an authoritarian regime. The thing about authoritarians is they have an incredibly limited outlook, an incredible need to conform, a conviction that anybody who's competent must share their exact way of thinking, which is a huge weakness.

I wrote a piece for the Globe and Mail a while ago saying "Authoritarianism is a catastrophic military disadvantage. The US military and others have conducted tons of studies showing, for instance, that diversity is a big military advantage. It improves things ranging from resilience to unit cohesion and more broadly, agile military thinking because they value outside perspectives.

During World War II, Hitler and his cronies were constantly hobbled by the fact that they excluded violently so many people who wound up contributing marvelously to the allied side of the fight." Anyway, I write this piece and then a very belligerent guy writes to me and says, what about the Spartans? I guarantee that everything he thinks he knows about the Spartans he got from the movie 300.

The stories we tell matter. A ton of guys watched that movie and came away from it thinking, well, the best fighters are a small group of guys who have 12 packs and don't wear shirts but in a totally straight way, and fight against these dark-skinned Persians using the power of their own conformity. The stories we tell matter. Of course, the 300 guys should make their movie, but it's useful to have historians out there too, talking about how it really worked. All of these things are in the end stories.

It's important to have a plurality of stories out there so that we can arrive at a better and more useful truth, including about what happened during World War II and how we won it.

Brooke Gladstone: Elise Graham is a historian and professor at Stony Brook University and the author of ,. Thanks so much for being here.

Elise Graham: Thanks for having me.

Micah Loewinger: That's it for this week's Show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark-Callender, Candice Wang, and Katerina Barton.

Brooke Gladstone: Our technical director is Jennifer Munson. Our engineer is Brendan Dalton. Eloise Blondiau is our senior producer, and our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the Media is a production of WNYC Studios. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

Micah Loewinger: I'm Micah Loewinger.

 

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