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Book and Dagger: How scholars and librarians became spies during World War II
- paganel 2y agoIt 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_education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Nuland#Early_life_and...
- coliveira 2y ago> 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.
- warner25 2y ago> 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 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.
- grajaganDev 2y agoThe CIA largely recruited only from Ivy League universities well into the 1980s.
- ajcp 2y agoNow it's mainly BYU...
- grajaganDev 2y agoThey will have to compete with the FBI.
- PittleyDunkin 2y agoI 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 2y agothere are definitely actively people going to Yale that are going to the CIA, I actually think Yale is a more common one
- PittleyDunkin 2y agoWell something must have changed if they're having to show up at a job fair.
- whimsicalism 2y agoi knew people, they were recruited prior to even entering college crazy as it sounds as part of their scholarship
- cushychicken 2y agoTurns 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.
- jeffbee 2y agoI also remember when magazines didn't crash your tabs. Anyway 3 Days of the Condor is a pretty good film.
- grajaganDev 2y agoIt 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 2y agoIs it? If you lived your entire life exclusively around "spies", would you be able to tell? (don't think too much about it).
- grajaganDev 2y agoYes - there is very little HUMINT happening nowadays. The end of an era. I am going to pass on addressing your hypothetical question.
- alganet 2y agoIf 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).
- grajaganDev 2y ago>In this scenario, all this shit about spies (movies estabilishing their personas, tall tales, especulations) is nothing but misdirection. Not if you are arrested for espionage. Of course I cannot disclose my sources and methods - I concede the argument.
- charlieyu1 2y ago[flagged]
- underseacables 2y agoMaybe 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.
- calvinmorrison 2y agoNow the top spies against us are all Academics!
- DiscourseFan 2y ago[flagged]
- 23B1 2y agoAnd those graduates also subsequently make their way into the IC.
- Der_Einzige 2y agoIt’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 2y agomy 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.
- 23B1 2y agoI don't think it's about one ideology over the other. It's about extremism of any sort that threatens to become violent. I'm not justifying or excusing it, but in my limited experience it's mostly about the bureaucratic justification of continued funding. Then the nuance becomes: 'Are these extremist movements genuine speech, or a function of foreign interference' and more often than not, it's both. (I have no idea why the parent comment was flagged, would love an explanation for it though)
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- rayiner 2y agoAmerican academia is still full of spies and foreign agents: https://www.propublica.org/article/why-russian-spies-really-like-american-universities https://www.propublica.org/article/why-russian-spies-really-...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pvg 2y agoButina'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)?
- metalman 2y agoMao 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 2y ago> 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.
- metalman 2y agoyup, and if we read the same account, then China is still suffering from a the loss of song birds. From observing song birds, especialy in winter, they are very busy eating, dormant insects and there egg clusters, and most of the over wintering birds are doing this, up too crows.Colder weather pushes the birds to seak out the higher energy food from insects, rather than seeds and plants, and the cold weather will kill certain types of pests in the ground.So warmer weather and no birds did kill more Chinese, than the Japanese in ww2. Its one of the bleaker demonstrations of the law of unintended consiquences. Something similar happened in India, when they killed all the snakes,(cobras), which used to keep the now out of control rat population in check. The disease and food destruction caused by rats, is orders of magnitude more deadly and costly than the snakes ever were.And now there are spoty efforts to rehabilitate the snakes reputation and the place they occupied for millenia.
- Der_Einzige 2y agoAs 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…
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Yawrehto 2y agoAnother bonus to World War II intelligence efforts was the relatively high number of German-speaking American Jews, some refugees from Nazi Germany, who had both the linguistic ability and motive to help. Second and third generation Japanese Americans, eager to prove their patriotism, also helped, as did the famous Navajo (and at least one other less famous tribe, I believe it was the Comanche) Code Talkers. The bureaucratic nature of the military did lead to misclassifications, though. For instance, my great-grandfather, a German-Jewish refugee whose first language was German, was originally assigned to fight in Japan; he wound up interrogating German captives, presumably more helpfully.