Talking about accidental spies. It is moderated welcome to thf Congress National book festival. I am kevin butterfield, the director of the john include the center of the library of congress. The kludgy center works to bring scholars into residents who work at the collections of the library of congress for up to a year to write books like these and be a part of a national dialogue. Welcome to everyone joining us live on cspan today. We are proud to partner with cspan again this year. You will encounter a range of intriguing conversations on the range of the american spy craft to an event about how our eating choices define who we are. We will be hearing about climate change, the practice of interior design in black homes, what it means to be a latino in america. We hope you engage in the conversation, ask questions and joint writers for their signs. Our first panel today, accidental spies features john lyle, janet wallick and jeff gaetz. The debut book he will talk about today is the dirty tricks department. Janet is the author of 10 books, her latest is flirting with danger. Our moderator, jeff of cbs news, the host of the cbs news podcast, america changed forever. Lets welcome them to the stage. [applause] hello, hello, hello. I am not perky like you this morning. [laughter] i do not know how you do it. I wake up this morning for teatime. This is a little different. Forgive me if, you know, my mind starts wandering toward the golf course and i asked some ridiculous questions. That is when you come in. We want you to participate. Obviously, you are not going to get the opportunity to often to speak to the authors of these incredible books. I think the library of congress has done a great job of matching moderators with authors, because when i picked up the book, i was like, ok. Cia, i like that. This is write down my alley. It does not golf, but. [laughter] thanks for coming, janet and john. Appreciate your time. I loved your books. It reminded me of college, where i had to cram to study up, but i am ready. I am ready. Lets talk about the books. We are going to start with flirting with danger. I love the title. I love the book. In part because it talks about maryland and it talks about baltimore. [laughter] so, it was interesting to me. You have this heroin, right, this woman who decided when it wasnt the same for women to be spies, she wanted to be a spy and she was a pretty good spy. Tell us about marguerite harrison. Janet she was from maryland. In fact, she was an ace eighth generation american from a very prominent family in maryland. She was part of well, she was the daughter of the gilded age. Her father was a shipping tycoon. Her mother was a socialite hostess who wanted her daughter to marry for money and title. Jeff i want that for my daughters. [laughter] nothing wrong with that. Janet [laughter] well, marguerite was a rebel. She was not so keen on what her mother wanted. She did have a romance with a turkish bay. She did have very dual dinners with Winston Churchill dull dinners with Winston Churchill, who stepped on her toes when they went dancing. She did marry a handsome stockbroker from maryland, but he had more charm than money. She was madly in love with him, he her. She had one of the most lavish weddings ever held in maryland. This was i forgot to say she was born not long after the civil war in 1878. So, right after the wedding well, nine months after the wedding, they had a son. [laughter] i kept count. Jeff [laughter] janet they made it. [laughter] and, they had a wonderful society kind of life. You know, the country club dinners and the charity luncheons and the special dances and all of that. Jeff all right, so why did she want to be a spy . She seems to have a perfect life and existence. Why do that dangerous work . Janet she did. But, in 1915, her husband died very young. She was a widow at 37. She was very interested in world affairs. She had traveled as a child to europe every summer. She spoke five languages fluently. At the age of 10, she was the family translator in germany and france. That is pretty impressive. She has not traveled at all with her husband, she was at home taking care of the family. When her husband died, instead of going back to the family to live with her father or inlaws, she went out on her own, not a likely thing for Society Woman a Society Woman to do. She got a job at the baltimore as a assistant society editor. When the war broke out as a reporter when america joined the war as a reporter, she wanted to go to the front. No women were allowed at the front. So. She applied for a job as a spy. What else . [laughter] and, she applied first to Naval Intelligence because that is where the Intelligence Department was at the time. And they said, a woman . Not a chance. So, she applied to the army that was just setting up intelligence. There had not been a cia, and oss, none of that. The army sent an interviewer who talked to her and her german was so good that he was worried. [laughter] janet he said, how long did you live in germany . She said, i am in eighth generation american. I have always lived here. He thought jeff he thought she might be sympathetic to the nazi cause. Janet exactly, kaiser, we were in world war i. He wasnt sure she was synthetic. No, was not true. The head of military intelligence was a wonderful name of marlborough churchill, love it. Said, you are hired. She was the First American woman sent overseas. She was a spy in germany, and russia and the far east. And, hugely successful in her work. Jeff i kept thinking, james bond. Somebody needs to make a movie about marguerite harrison, unless there is already one out there. Is there . Janet no, no. [laughter] jeff once hollywood comes back from strike, we can make a proposal. Janet that is right. I have to say, the New York Times review which i think comes out tomorrow in the papers, called her George Smiley in a mink trail coat. [laughter] jeff [laughter] so, you mentioned oss, which brings me to johns book. For those of you who do not know , oss was one of the precursors to the cia. There were several different versions of that agency. Your book is the dirty tricks it caught my attention. Flirting with danger and dirty tricks. Tell me about, stanley level . Tell us about him. He is the driving character. John stanley is a chemist from around boston. He worked for much of his early life in a shoe and leather factory, nothing that would indicate he would get involved in intelligence agencies. When world war ii happened, especially after pearl harbor, he felt a patriotic fervor. He happened to run into carl compton, who at the time was the president of m. I. T. Carl compton knew stanley level and said, we need someone like you in washington, d. C. To help out. Lovell quit his job after that. In his papers in the archives, you can see his stated reason for leaving his job says war. He left his job, goes to washington, d. C. And becomes an aide first to benin for bush. If anyone has seen the recent movie often hyper oppenheimer , he makes a few appearances in there. Bush is from the northeast. He has a similar attitude of lovell. He recommends him to join the oss. The head of the oss at the time is William Donovan. Donovan is this war hero from world war i, the head of this organization now in charge of conducting espionage, conducting information campaigns and sabotaging the enemy abroad during world war ii. That is the main thing the oss is doing. Bush recommends lovell to donovan, donovan recruits lovell , we need you here. Here is how it happened. Stanley lovell gets a letter saying, meet me at this one building in bc he does not know who the letter is from. He shows up to this building, does not know why he is there or who he has meeting. He is led into this room that is barren. He waits for a couple of hours. All of a sudden, William Donovan comes in the room and has got a medal of honor on his lapel and says, Stanley Lovell, i need you to be the professor moriarty of the oss. Lovell is thinking to himself, moriarty is the bad guy. [laughter] lovell talks donovan through and donovan says, we need a scientist to create the disguises for our undercover agents. He recruits lovell to be that person. Lovell heads the research and Development Branch of the oss and does throughout the war, creating gadgets and disguises. Jeff what is interesting to is how he had to reorient his mind from doing good to being as people as possible. John that is one of the main arcs of the book. Stanley lovell is reluctant to get involved in this work in the first place. After donovan recruits him, a few weeks later, he goes to donovans house and says, i do not know if im cut out for this. I am a scientist. He felt this hippocratic obligation, science has created good things, agriculture and medicines. Now, i am going to use the knowledge i have gained in order to create weapons that are going to kill people. Donovan basically says, suck it up, we need someone to do this. This war is important, you are going to help us. Throughout this book, we see a level of development and arc in a character from someone who is reluctant to engage in this behavior to at the end of the work, Stanley Lovell is advocating for the United States to use things like chemical weapons in the pacific, biological weapons. It is a strange turn how he goes from reluctance he too advocating for the use of weapons for mass destruction. Jeff it is a dilemma, i think, for anyone who chooses that type of work. Of course, most people will not choose that type of work. But, what is coursing through both books is a sense of patriotism. From the characters in your book to characters in your book, and so, i am wondering as i listen to you describe the book, the research in both of these books is, to me, meticulous. How much time, janet, did that take . Janet well, it took me 30 years to find her. Jeff 30 years . Janet yes. I was doing research in 1993 in newcastle, england at the University Library for a book about gertrude bell, who was the chief creator of the rack after world war i for the british. All her papers were there. Thousands of letters and diaries and journals and so on. I came across a letter that she had written home to her father in 1924, saying that this extraordinary American Woman had come through town and she had invited her to dinner and had never had heard such tales from a woman and how this american had everybody under her spell. She invited her not once, but twice to two dinners. It was the same thing. I read this and i thought, an American Woman in baghdad in 1924, what was she doing there . She must have been a spy. This is the first thing that came to my mind. It stayed with me. I tried to find information about her. I could not. I worked wrote five books. Each time i finished a book, i looked for the next subject and i could not find anything. I hired a professional researcher. She found nothing. Finally, i was determined after the last book. I said, she can hide for me for just so long. I am going to find her. I wound up filing a request for information. Sure enough, her papers were in the National Archives right here in washington, in college park, maryland. That was fabulous, tedious, frustrating experience. You are constantly filling out forms and getting permissions and waiting hours and hours for papers to arrive. But, what i found in there was like gold. Jeff indeed. Janet it was classified papers. Jeff where did you find those classified papers just kidding. Janet [laughter] i did take home copies. Jeff i do not know where that came from. [laughter] do we name a special counsel . Just kidding. Did you go into that process thinking, ok, i want to look for a female spy, early 1900s, or did you know marguerite was the one you wanted to profile . Janet the little bit i read about her told me she was the one. Her whole viewpoint was as an internationalist. She really cared about world affairs. That is something that has always interested me. She was really smart. She was beautiful. She was charming because her governess told her, you can be intellectual if you want, but you will get much further being charming. Jeff [laughter] janet which, there is a lot of truth in that, i guess. And where she went and what she did, how she inserted herself into every level of society was fascinating. Jeff it really is, it really is. Stanley lovell is another one. He came essentially orphaned and found his way to cornell was at dartmouth then cornell . John yes. Jeff he really rose through modest means. And, he is not a household name. How did you find him . John yeah, he was orphaned from a young age. Both of his parents died young. He was raised essentially by his older sister, who put him through school. I found him through researching my dissertation. I went to school at the university of texas. I was working on scientists within the Intelligence Community. Through reading about that, i would come across this name, Stanley Lovell, he is the guy during world war ii who invented the kinds of things like glowing foxes and cyanide pills and all kinds of stuff. I was intrigued, but i was focusing on my dissertation. Every time i would go to the archives and we were talking backstage, we spent a lot of time in the National Archives every time i would go, do not tell my professors, but half the time i would work on my dissertation. The other half, in the back of my mind, i knew i was going to talk about Lovell Lovell stanley. I would pull out documents for my dissertation but also Stanley Lovell and do that on the side. I did that throughout grad school. Eventually, i finished school and decided, i am going to put the dissertation away and focus on another thing. Jeff i am going to hang out in the National Archives fulltime. [laughter] john for some people, it can be fun. That is the origin of how i found Stanley Lovell, i knew his name through researching scientists through the community. The story was almost too good for me not to follow up on. It kind of became most and obsessive thing. I just wanted to know more about who he was. I spent a lot of my time doing that. Jeff the book talks about there was one quote, when you work in tv, you hear things in soundbites. I have been in tv for 35 years now. One good sound bite in your book is when someone is talking about, oh, all you really need are seven properly trained men to do these dirty tricks. They can cripple a city, which is good information for a special report on. [laughter] who said that . And, was that the thinking at the time as they tried to get the oss up and running . John that was kind of the thinking, especially for Stanley Lovells branch within the oss. When Stanley Lovell was appointed to head this branch, he did not know what to do because the United States did not have the same pedigree and various warfare as someone like the british. The first thing lovell is go to does is go to england. How can we take some of those ideas and use them ourselves . For instance, one of the things Stanley Lovell recreates is something called a lipid mind, a minute you can put on the bottom of a ship so after a while, it will detonate and sink the ship. He got that from the british. When he is in england, that is when one of his british counterparts says this thing about, oh, you need seven welltrained men are able to destroy a city if you know the right places to attack. That is how Stanley Lovell got his ideas from the british. When he gets back to the United States, a lot of what he is doing is brainstorming. He does not have any direction. His idea is, we will throw stuff against the wall, see what sticks and what the soldiers and undercover saboteurs need abroad. They started creating devious inventions. Jeff your account takes place in the early 1900s world war i. Yours is really 1945, 1940 timeframe with the nazis, they spread across europe. The japanese bombed pearl harbor and roosevelt was looking for, well, they were looking for as much information as they could get on the enemy because the enemy well, britain is not an enemy, but they had their intelligence apparatus in place. The u. S. Did not. The fbi had been created, but in terms of intelligence gathering, which is, yeah, it is law enforcement, but a different kind of law enforcement. As nefarious as it sounds, sabotage and dirty tricks, that is the way things work. In the intelligence game. I wanted to ask you, janet, and do not forget i need you to ask questions, too. Ok . Im going to be asking for questions in the next couple of minutes. We want people to take away what do you want people to take away from the book . Janet how extraordinary a woman she was and how women can do extraordinary things. Nobody expected a woman to be able to do what marguerite did. In fact, from the time the war started and we were thinking about getting involved in it and we were worried about the the public was worried, who is going to earn a living for our families if our men are overseas . She went out and did jobs men only did, like at the ship building plants, streetcar conductors, and showed how women would just take over their husbands or fathers jobs and the world life would go on. Then, of course, she was one of the most important intelligence agents in world war i. So, yeah. We can do a lot. [laughter] jeff it was almost like the enemy did not see her coming. They were not expecting someone like her in that kind of job. All right, who has a question . Right there. Can you stand up . Oh, there is a mic. That was my fault. I should have told you there was a mic. [laughter] i am just curious. Was it as difficult to find out about marguerites personal life as it was her professional life . Did she have to leave her son behind . Were you able to find out that information, as well . It is just harrowing. Janet it was harder in a way to find out the personal information, because her daughter in law destroyed all of her letters home. That tells you a little bit about her relationship with her daughter in law. [laughter] and, with her son, which was a loving but very which was loving but very distant. That was distant physically and emotionally. So, that created a lot of problems. Jeff are you sure the daughter in law did not want to destroy the correspondence . Did they know she was a spy . Janet yes. This is much later. This is second marriage and much, much later in her life. She had told her family about what she was doing. I was very lucky she has two granddaughters who are around who were very interested in this book. And, in helping to tell her story. They were wonderful. I did get good information from them. Jeff i see. Right over here. Two questions, if i may. Lovell seems like an odd choice, a random chemist at a leather factory. What was it about him that led him lead them to think of him for this position . Can you give examples he had a few main things that work to his advantage. He was from new england and a lot of the people who were in washington dc and scientific positions were from new england so he knew these people. Like mrs. Bush was not in charge with coordinating manhattan project, fuses. This worked in his favor to get the job. As for the second one of the question, i mentioned batch bonds and glowing process . It was this idea that instead of dropping incendiary bombs on tokyo and they may not hit a target. What if we had bats, invent this incendiary, attaches to the back and put it in hibernation, fly them to japan release the ballots they will wake up and they will go into roost and warehouses, buildings, incentive wasting bombs they will go where we want them to theyll blow up some fires in cities and we would have to use as many resources. And never got put into use in japan, obviously. It works because during one test one of the bats got away and flew into a military barrick into a control tower and blew them. Thats one example of one of these gadgets. Silent pistols, cyanide pills, forged documents, disguises, how to artificially age, turning them into of long shore fisherman. This is what they would do. Jeff i think it was still Lowell Stanley lowell if you had to do this to the enemy how would you operate . Alone, on the sole mission and what he say . John when level was v. A. To bush. She gave a couple of his aides a test and he said if you were stranded on an enemy beach and there were guards he needed to take out. What weapon would you want to have with you . He walks around washington dc thinking about the weapon and he submits an answer which is silence, fleshless pistol and they thought thats what you would need. That is one of the weapons that they create and it turned out to be useful. This pistol created during world war ii the messiah used it for several seconds. Jeff where their silencers on weapons . John yeah, the early months. 0 this is for janet and john. Does your protagonist continue after the war and if not, how do they adapt going to civilian life . Janet after marguerite went to russia where she was in prison 10 months. She went on to the far east and she was in japan where the japanese wanted her to spy on the chinese. The chinese wanted her to spy on the russians and the americans wanted her to spy on the japanese. In 1924, she was in persia where she made one of the first, silent film documentaries of the nomadic tribe and it was a deathdefying trip across the highest mountains of persia and through goatskin barges, rapids. She continued for a while and like so many spies she just faded away. Jeff a question over here . Thank you for your amazing stories. At home, i just finished my binge of the americas. It led me to think about, do either of these individuals, it seems like they were hiding in plain sight. Were they ever exposed for what they were doing by the enemy . John not so much. He worked under William Donovan as head of the oss. The germans put out an article on donovan saying he is the spymaster. He knows all the stuff, unlimited funds. He thought there spreading misinformation i dont have any of that. After lovell, he was not a wellknown figure. Not many people suspect what he was doing and if they did, he was working in the United States. He did not deploy abroad. He created people abroad with gadgets and disguises. If i can follow up on the last question about what happened to him after the work, he did continued this work in the way. He was a consultant to the cia after the oss. He was a consultant and recommended to allen dulles that they create a branch similar to the r d branch in the ss. He creates a Technical Services staff and thats the branch for cia to create gadgets. There is an interesting parallel at work. One of the scientists who had stopped branch is called sending gottlieb. End of heard of mk ultra, he ran that. Our write his papers and was hoping to make a connection but theyre doing similar things at different times is there a connection . In the archives, taking pictures of documents and take as many as i could before i had to leave so i didnt have time to sit there and focus on the documents. I was looking at these depositions of stanley gottlieb and then i saw his name Stanley Lovell. I was so excited i know he is connected and i found what the connection was between world war ii veteran and mk ultra side to you have to find the book to find out. Jeff that is what we call a tease. Look at this crowd. All of these people are up in the morning to talk about spy craft. Question for the first woman spy. She was not acknowledged at all when she had approached the navy. The army took a risk on her. What were some of the early challenges that she had within the spy community in terms of the navy . It was all men, no women. Then you have her becoming a spy for another branch of the army. John she was a part of society that was patrician, well bred, well educated northeast. She actually attended radcliffe and many of the men and intelligence went to harvard. She was at the same class and that gave her acceptance within the Intelligence Community. In all of the classes and papers are read and it was a lot of gossip, i guess remarks going back and forth about her work and where she was what she was doing. How risky it was. How courageous it was or was too dangerous. Nobody actually referred to agency in terms of her being a female. She was accepted but her work use her ability to engage with people from the highest echelons of society as well as hanging out of the bar and drinking beers. When she was in germany, her job was to find out what was going on. No americans have been there during the war because it wasnt ranson belgium. We need to know if we find a peace agreement. How big was our military, economy, infrastructure that was her job to find out. She could be very Close Friends with the former german army officer and she could be friends with the average working person and thats how she got her information. It so happens that she also had to be joined secret societies on the right and left with socialist and within that group, somebody had a contact of the state department was a double agent. And that is how she ended up in in lubyanca. Jeff there are similar plot twist that a lot of the hires within the oss were from wealthy families, millionaires, they could have been doing other things are nothing at all. John one of the jokes about the oss is that it was composed of people who were pale, male, yell. There was a similar pedigree to a lot of these people. There were a lot of acquisitions against the oss who did not like the electorate but they felt it was infringing on their turf so one of the jokes was that it stood for oh, so, social. Another was that it handed out cellophane permission so you didnt get deployed and it kept the draft off. There was this social aspect to it as especially people made fun of donovan. He resented this and when they said that to him there was an admiral in the navy who mentioned this is a social club of people youre not doing anything so because of his friends and he tells them, break into his office and bring the documents. So they break into his office and safe plant dynamite and rushed to where he is on this dinner party. He walks to the admirable as it says here are the contacts and there are some dynamite in your office. Jeff those are dirty tricks for you. I was hoping you read each others books. I was wondering what you thought these two people who involved in the same adventure shared in common . John even the topic of this panel is accidental spies. They were not the first person you would think of. A scientist in the dirty tricks department. In a female journalist towards the end of world war i but the more i thought about it i think there are similarities in that these are two people who you might suspect would go into this kind of thing. Journalists, spies tend to use journalism as a cover. Journalists ask a lot of question. If your baker ask you about what lionel youre using for a missile it seems suspicious. A journalist is just asking questions. Its easier to use it as a cover for espionage and similar was scientists as well. This is prevalent around 1950 cia that was trying to recruit scientists and service spies because thats all they want to do is ask questions. Is not weird if a scientist is asking you about an alloy its expected. The problem they ran into is that they wanted to talk about their work so much they would get information and theyre liable to give it away. Jeff reporters do that too. I have to be honest. Janet they were both patriotic. They put their lives at risk to do this work. They believed in their country. And i think thats something. Jeff especially today. How large was the context of spies . How many were out there and how many individuals were in the oss at the time . Janet i dont know how many spies there were not a lot. We used attaches around the world. They were feeding information in this dimension, marguerite was the only woman sent overseas. This is a small community. John the oss became a Large Organization over time. There were thousands of personnel. Not many of them were in this branch. The main component of the branches a dozen scientists at the Congressional Country Club in the basement of the clubhouse. There were not that many scientists involved with the but one thing that he pioneered in a way it was to creating contracts to develop weapons. He would contract things to deliver to different universities. It wasnt just the oss are being question. What captures the american fascination with spies so what got you interested in the idea . Janet i dont think there alone. Think about the british. With the spies stories and novels. I think every country has his particular fascination. The russians were way ahead of the americans during world war i and developing secret ways of spying. They were the ones who invented using urine to write in secret. John theres a fascination with espionage, not particular to the United States. It is almost a detective story. Im looking at archives, documents, make connections and find letters in the story of how the story is made itself is interesting. Its a similar thing to whats happening with espionage. It suspends, what is gonna happen . Inherent in the plot of any spy book or novel is suspense, the thrill of the hunt. Thus how you feel when youre doing research. Its more of a broader sense of people like being in suspense in the story. Its exciting. You talked about her dull dinner with wasnt turtle . How do you have a dull dinner with Winston Churchill . Was not part of spy craft or sociostation . Janet she married the right man and she knew Winston Churchills american mother. He wanted to talk serious talk at dinner and she was a debutante and this was the point in her life where she wanted to have a good time. He had come back from the war, destroying parliament, he was interested in europe. Its just offer her. Despite oxleys stepping on her toes. Despite actually stepping on her toe. Im trying to process a dull dinner with churchill. What were the one or two threads that you just couldnt follow up on. What wakes up at night and you think, i would love to hear that. John one of the chapters in the book is called the Document Division about the part of the r d branch that was in charge of forging passports, tickets. There is a part of it the talks about secret writing with yearend, lemon juice. A lot of famous chemists working on this including Linus Pauling a twotime nobel prize winner. I could not find that many documents on the creation of a secret writing technique so if i found the document to audits of the book it would be on secret writing because its intriguing. We could only tell of the sources tell us and if i did not have the source i couldnt talk about it. Janet one of the things that i was inspired by his theres two kinds of intelligence, positive where you report on whats happening wherever you are. She was reporting on political, social, economical situation in germany. There is also negative intelligence which is counterintelligence and that is reporting on people who are trying to undermine our country. That was a lot of what marguerite did in germany and russia. She was involved in trying to get an american cartoonist, one of the most popular at the time, into american hands. He was a socialist and she was told to track them down and pretend to be, do whatever she had to do because she had to get instructions. She had to pretend to be a radical supporter of bolshevism. It did not work out. She found information about him that they cannot use but the government let him go because his father a fraud. She said that situation caused her great sorrow is for many years to come. That is where the double agent was involved. I wouldve loved to have had the specifics. Its very hard to find specific statements. They did not write them down. They had to be careful. Jeff one my question . A question related to something someone asked earlier about spies coming out. The code breakers and stories of women and world war ii are there more stories of women that did spy craft work in world war i . Janet i think there are wonderful stories about world war i that will come out. If they come out about women it will be women working here and not overseas. But im sure theyre Great Stories to be told. This is a question thats more about intelligence overall. I want to hear your take the consequences in the long run of intelligence . Postsecond world war the u. S. Was involved in a lot of coups, iran, hunters. Which of the time were thought to be positive results but over the long run, we see the relationship with iran, nicaragua is doing that. A lot of it has dirty tricks. We want to think about your ideas of the value of intelligence in general in the long run . John intelligence is very helpful. And typically, there is an analysis portion of that. Intelligence gathering and analysis. Thats very useful to know about what her potential enemies doing. How many choose to they have, where are their initial stations . There are two aspects to the Intelligence Community and the second one developed very early in the history of the cia. The cia was created as an intelligence gathering mechanism. Its a way to inform the president on whats going on in the world. Very soon after 1947 the cia expanded its edits mo beyond that not just to be a intelligence gathering but covert operations. Not just finding out whats going on but trying to influence whats going on. There are a lot more negative things to say about this operation. The intelligence gathering side is a necessary thing in the modern world. Theyre not just nefarious because they have bad results abroad but one of the things that they do if theyre exposed and have seen immoral or unethical as devalue trust in the government. The fact we would do Something Like this, it leads us down the slippery slope. If they did not and of course they would still be doing that. When i studied mk ultra. One of the typical things and people who are conspiracy theorist is why would the government perform this experience on people . Theyre obviously still doing them today. Its easy to use that as an example that if that happened eventually its going on . It undermines trust in the government which is the worst things that these covert operations adept doing. I have a followup question. You set unethical covert operations. Jeff in the name of defending the country, is there a limit to what you should be doing . John this is one of the central question and thought im playing out in this book. It is focusing on dirty tricks. These are documents of perpetrators. What were you thinking when you did this . Didnt you know the consequences would lead people to suffer . You can see the gears spending in peoples minds thinking about why did we do that . They had justifications. Is not that there unethical people because they want to see people suffer. Thats really the case. Very few people are just nefarious people. Sidney gottlieb was a patriot in his mind if the soviets does our water with lsd should we know what the effects are going to be . How will we find out what the effects are . Why dont we do it on a small scale and see how people react. That if the city gets dosed with that we will know how to respond. In his mind hes doing something patriotic. Im trying to prevent a catastrophe. Theres a lot of rational justification so its hard to walk the line between what is ethical and unethical . He thought what he was doing was ethical. He thought in the cold war, we are in a war. Im just as justified doing it in the cold war. Jeff we have about five minutes left, one must question. Do you expect her career in the stacks and you were recently with ai coming along how will that Impact Research . Its a one minute question. Janet i dont think you could substitute human intelligence. The kind of work that marguerite allison did engaged in a personal relationship with people who have information that otherwise would not be gained. For example, the german former officers were plotting to go against any treaty that was signed and to create monarchy states, right wing states and prussia and in eastern after world war i. She saw on the streets people marching, Army Officers and uniforms, poison grade jackets and caps, next hi, nice hi goosestepping to stomp out the jews. This is what you need people to see and know about and know ai is going to do that. [applause] john ai will play a role in what historians do with documents and more are digitized. Until there digitized they have to go to the archive. When they are digitized it will enable ai or search algorithms define specific phrases, events and collate a bunch of information together from a bunch of different sources and archives that historians would never been able to go to on their own. Hopefully it could be used to aid historians and not try to write history themselves. I would like future where historians can talk about what happened in the past. It will be a big deal especially when documents get digitized. The fact ill be able to be searched and until that day, someone needs to conduct an interview which is where we come in. [applause] jeff the most perfect way we can end. This standing room only crowd. There is t