This story contains adult content and language.

Listener discretion is advised.

She was very good at her job,

and she refused to tell her superiors her methods,

even though they sent her letters begging,

like, just tell me how you're

doing this, tell me how you're finding this, and she never told them.

I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor in Austin, Texas.

I'm also the co-hosts of the podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career, research for my many audio and book projects has taken me around the world.

On Wicked Words, I sit down with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers, and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true

crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both good and bad, and it's a deep dive

into the unpublished details behind their stories. Did you know that some of the most effective

American spies during World War II were librarians and

archivists and history professors? Some were locked in the basement of the Library of Congress

analyzing documents. Those documents were being gathered by academics sneaking around Europe

under the noses of the Nazis. Author Elise Graham tells me the story at the

center of her book, Book and Dagger, how scholars and librarians became the unlikely spies of World War II.

When you are at a dinner party or meeting new people and they say, we're an author, what kind of book was

this? What do you say? Because it's certainly not a quick summary. It's what are the themes and what

makes the book important you think and relevant to an audience now. So what would you say the book is about?

And say this is a history of the OSS, which was a precursor to the CIA, which came together very quickly in the wake of Pearl Harbor.

At this time, the United States didn't have a standing intelligence agency. And so William Donovan, who was the head of the OSS, had to pull together a working spy agency very quickly. And an intelligence agency, as the name might

...