So far, so good. Thanks for being with us and just a reminder, only four hours from washington so you can come up to the National Book fair in any year you want. We are going to go to the first offer discussion of the day. This is a group of authors talking about accidental spies and its moderated by jeff of cbs. Here it is. Our coverage of the 2023 library of congress National Book festival continues now. Welcome to the library of congress National Book festival. Im the director of the center of the library of congress. The cookie center is one of the sponsors of the festival and we are proud to bring the most beloved riders here. The center works to bring scholars into residents that work in the collections for up tohe a year to write books like these and to be a part of the national dialogue. Welcome to everyone joining on cspan today. A range today from the history ofon american spycraft to an evt about how the choices define who we are we will be hearing about climate change, but it needs to be latino in america. We hope you engage in the conversations today, ask questions and join the riders. The first panel today accidental spies the scientist and socialites janet and geoffrey. The historian of science and ofe American Intelligence Community the date you book today is the dirtyy Tricks Department. Janet is. The author of ten books. Her latest is flirting with danger the mysterious life of Marguerite Harrison and moderator cbs news chief National Figures and the justice correspondent o also the host of the podcast america change forever. Lets welcome them to the stage. [applause] i am not perky like you this morning. I dont know how you do it. This is a little different. Forgive me if my mind starts wandering toward the golf course and i ask some ridiculous questions. Thats when you come in. We want you to participate. Obviously you are not going to get this opportunity too often to speak to the authors of these incredible books. I think the library of congress has done a great job of matching moderators because when i picked up the book im like okay, spycraft, cia. I like that. This is write down my alley. I mean, its not golf. [laughter] thanks for coming. Appreciate your time. I loved your books. It sort of reminded me of college where i had to cram to study up, but im ready. Lets talk about the books. Weks are going to start with flirting with danger. Love the title. I love the book in part because it talks about maryland and it talks about baltimore, not baltimore, baltimore. It was interesting to me and then you have this woman who decided when it wasnt the thing for women to be spies, she wanted to be a spy and she was a pretty good spy. Tell us about Marguerite Harrison. She was from maryland and in fact she was in eighth generation american from a very prominent family in maryland and she was part of she was the daughter of the gilded age. Her father was a shipping tycoon and her mother was a socialite hostess who wanted her daughter to marry for money and title. I want that for my daughters. [laughter] marguerite was a rebel. She wasnt so keen on what her mother wanted. She did have a romance with a turkish and very bold dinners with Winston Churchill. [laughter] who would step on her toes when they went dancing. She married a handsome stockbroker and she was madly in love with him and he with her. She had one of the most lavish weddings ever held in maryland and this was i forgot to say she was born not long after the civil war in 1878. So, right after, well, nine months after the wedding, they had a son. [laughter] i did count. [laughter] they had a wonderful society kind of life. The country club dinners and charity luncheons andan special dances and all that. She seemed to have a perfect life ande. Existence. She did. But in 1915, her husband died, very young. She was a widow. She was very interested in World Affairs and traveled as a child to europe every summer. She spoke five languages fluently and at the age of ten she was the family translator in germany and france. Thats pretty impressive. She hadnt traveled at all with her husband. She was at home taking care with of the family. Her husband died, instead of going back to the family to live with her father, her inlaws, she went out on her own not a likely thing for a Society Woman to do. She got a job at the Baltimore Sun as an assistant society editor, then when the war broke out as a reporter, when america joined with the war as a reporter and she wanted to go to the front, no women were allowed at the front. So she applied for jobs as a spy. What else. And she applied first to naval l intelligence because thats where the Intelligence Department was at the time and they said a woman . Not a chance. So she applied topl the army tht was just setting up intelligence. There hadnt been a cia, oss, none of that. The army sent an interviewer wo talked to her and her german was so good that he was worried. [laughter] he said how long did you live in germany and she said i am in eighth generation american. Ive only lived here. He thought she might be sympathetic to exactly. He was sure. But no, it wasnt true so the head of military intelligence had the wonderful name of marlborough churchill, love it said you are hired and she was the First American woman sent overseas. With germany and russia and the far east and hugely successful in her work. I kept thinking james bond. Somebody needs to make a movie about marguerite unless there is already one out there. No. [laughter] once hollywood comes back from strike. We can make a proposal. Thats right. I have to say the New York Times review that i think comes out tomorrow in the papers called her George Smiley in a mink coat. You mentioned oss which brings me for those of you that dont know, its one of the precursors to the cia. There were several different versions of that agency. Your book is the dirty Tricks Department. Danger and the dirty Tricks Department. Tell us about stanley lavelle. Tell us about him. Hes the driving character. Hes the main character in the book. Hes a chemist from around boston. He worked for much of his early life in a shoe leather factory, indicate he would be involved in intelligence agencies. When world war ii happened after pearl harbor, he felt a kind of patriotic fervor he needed to do something for his country and happened to run into carl who at the time was the president of mit. He knew stanley and said you are a businessman and a chemist, we need to someone like you in washington, d. C. To help out, so he quit his job right after that and on his papers in the archives, you can see his stated reason for leaving his job justices war so he left his job to go to washington, d. C. And he becomes in aid first to bush and if anyone has seen the movie oppenheimer, theres a few appearances. So stanley is in aid and bush is also from the northeastsh and ha similar kind of attitude as stanley. Bush recommends stanley to join the oss, the head of the oss at the time is William Donovan. Donovan is a war hero from world war i, the head of this organization now thats been charged with conducting espionage and disinformation campaigns and also sabotaging the enemy abroad during world bowar ii. Thats kind of the main thing the oss is doing. Bush recommends him to donovan and donovan recruits him we need you here. Here is how it happens. Stanley gets a letter saying made to me meet me at this one building in dc and he doesnt know who the letter is from. He shows up to this building, budoesnt know why hes there or who hes meeting. He is in a room that is just barren and theres nothing there. He waits for a couple of hours and all of a sudden William Donovan comes in the room with a metal of honor on his lapel and says i need you to be the professor of the oss and hes thinking to himself no sherlock holmes, hes a bad guy. [laughter] but he talked with donovan and donovan says we need a spy to create the secret weapon for our undercover agents and so he recruits him to be that person and he ends up heading the Research Development branch and that ishe what he does throughot the war creating these gadgets and disguises. I thought that was interesting also how he had to reorient m his mind doing good o being as evil as possible. That is one of those main arts of the book. Hes reluctant to get involved in this in the first place. After donovan recruits him a few weekss later he goes to donovans house and he says i dont know if im cut out for this im a scientist and he felt this sort of hippocratic obligation i need to do good in society. Science has created good things. Agriculture that feeds people and medicine that keeps people well. Now im going to use the knowledge i gained to create weapons that are going to kill people . Donovan basically says just to screw it up we needed someone to do this. Of t the war is important. Youre going to help us. Throughout the book we see the character from someone who is reluctant to engage in this behavior to at the end of the war hes advocating for the United States to use things on prisoners of war, things like chemical weapons and the pacific, things like biological weapons so it is very strange how he goes from reluctance he too advocating for the use of weapons of mass destruction. It is a dilemma i think for anyone who chooses the type of work. Most people want choose the type of work but what is coursing through both books is a sense of patriotism from the characters in your book to the characters of your book and so im wondering as i listen to you describe the book the research in both of these books is to me meticulous. How much time did that take . It took me 30 years to find her. 30 years . Yes. I was doing research in 93 in new castle england at the University Library for a book about Gertrude Bell who was the chiefat creator of iraq after world war i for the british. All her papers were there. Thousands of letters, 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 comehr through town and that shd invitedr her to dinner and 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 and 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. It was the first thing that came to my mind. And it stayed with me. I tried to find information about her. I couldnt. I wrote five books. Each time i finished the book i would look for the next subject as we always do and i couldnt findi anything. I hired a professional researcher and she found nothing. Finally i was determined after the last book and i said she can hide from me for just so long. I wound up filing a freedom of information request and sure enough her papers were in the National Archives right here in college park maryland. That was a fabulous frustrating experience because you are constantly filling out forms and getting permission and waiting for hours and hours for papers to arrive. But what i found was like gold. So it was classified papers some of them from where did you find those classified papers . [laughter] [inaudible] i dont know where that came from. So what did you do with them . Can we name a special counsel . [laughter] just kidding. But did you go into the process thinking okay early 1900s, or did you know marguerite was the one that you wanted . The little bit that i read about her old me she was the one. Her whole viewpoint was as an internationalist. She cared about World Affairs and thats something thats always interested me. She was really smart. She was beautiful and charming because her government pulled her you can be intellectual if you want but you get much further being charming which is the latter truth from that. And where she went and what she did and how she inserted herself into every level of society. It really is. And hes another one. Essentially orphaned and he found his way to cornell. He rose through modest means and is not a household name. He was orphaned from a young age. His parents died a young age and he was raised by his sister who was a seamstress and put him through school i was working on scientists within the community and through reading about that i would come across this name. He invented of the kind of things like bath bombs and glowing foxes and cyanide pills and all kinds of stuff and i was intrigued but i was focusing on my dissertation. Every time i would go to the archiveses and we were talking backstage we spent a lot of time in the National Archives. Every time i would go, dont tell my professors but half the time i would work on my dissertation and the other half i knew in the back of my mind sometime im going to write about stanley. I would pull documents from the dissertation but also just kind of do that on the side. Eventually i finished school and i decided im going to focus on thisis other thing. Now hang out in the National Archives fulltime. For some people it can be fun. [laughter] so thats the origin i guess of how i found stanley. I knew his name through researching within the Intelligence Community, but the story was almost too good for me not to follow up on. I couldnt hardly help myself. It kind of became almost an obsessive thing i wanted to know moreou about who he was so thats what i spend my t time doing. Talk about theres one quote. You work in tv and hear things and soundbites. Ive been in tv for 30 years now so when people talk thats good to know, soundbites. And one good soundbite in your book is when someone is talking about all you need are seven properly trained men to essentially do these dirty tricks that can cripple a city which that is good information for a special reporter. Who said the fat, and was that the thinking atan the time to ty to get it up and running . It was kind of the thinking g especially forve stanleys bran. When stanley was appointed the head of this branch, he didnt really know what to do because the United States didnt have the same pedigree and nefarious warfare as someone like the british and so the first thing he does is go to england to learn about what have you all done in the past and how can we kind of take some of those ideas and use them ourselves for instance one of the things he recreates is something called a limpid mind this is something that a separate work and place on the bottom of a ship and row away and its time until after it will detonate and sink the ship. He got that from the british. When hes in england thats when one of the british kind of counterparts says the thing about seven welltrained men are able to destroy a city if you know the right places to attack so thatss where that comes fro. Thats where he got some of his original ideas and then when he gets back to the United States a lot of what hes doing is just brainstorming. He doesnt have any direction so his idea is we will throw stuff against the wall, see what sticks in to see what the soldiers and undercover saboteurs need so they just start creating all kinds of inventions. Your account takes place in the early 1900s world war i. Really 1945, 1940 timeframe and the japanese bombed pearl harbor and roosevelt was looking for as much information as they could get on the enemy because they had the intelligence apparatus in place. In terms of intelligence gathering, its Law Enforcement but itss a different kind of w enforcement and is nefarious as it soundsbo sabotaging dirty tricks thats the way things work in the intelligence case. So i wanted to ask you, janet, and dont forget i need you to ask questions also. Going to be asking for questions in the next couple of minutes. What do you want people to take away from the book . 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 and the public was great whos going o earn a living for the family if we send our men overseas and she went out and gave jobs that only men did like shipbuilding plans and a streetcar conductors and showed how women could just take over their husbands or fathers jobs and the world life would go on and then of course she was one of the most important intelligence agents in world war i. So, yeah we can do a lot. Its almost like the enemy didnt see her coming. They were not expecting someone like her in that kind of job. We have a question right there. There is a microphone. I should have told you theres a microphone. Im 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 all that information as well because it is just harrowing. It was harder in a way to find out the personal information because her daughterinlaw destroyed all her letters home. That tells you a little about her relationship with her daughter and with her son, which was loving that a very distant and that created distance physically and emotionally so that created a lotre of problem. Were you sure the daughterinlaw didnt want to destroy the correspondence . Did they know that she was a spy . Yes, by the time but this was much later. This was her second marriage and this was much, much later so she had told her family about what she was doing but i was lucky that she had two granddaughters who were around who were very interested in this book and helping to tell her story so they were wonderful and i did get good information from them. Right over here. Two questions if i i may. It seems like an odd choice. What was it about him that led them to think that he is one they would want for the position and also can you give some examples of some