In 1942, Dr. Adele Kibre—dark-haired, wicked-eyed, a medievalist by training—began work as an overseas agent for the Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications. This Committee was a branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS): the wartime predecessor to the CIA, which sought to acquire documents in Europe that the Allies could use to develop intelligence and plan covert operations. Kibre, a scholar, was now also a spy. Kibre was an ideal fit for the job. After receiving a PhD in medieval linguistics (University of Chicago, 1930), she had spent almost a decade hopping from archive to archive across Europe, earning cash by taking photographs of rare texts for scholars back home in the United States. In addition to her camera skills, Kibre had a gift for gaining access to closed archives. When Kibre once asked—as Kathy Peiss describes, in a marvelous new book about spy craft and the book world during the Second World War—to view “an unusually rare manuscript in the Vatican,” a staffer explained that Kibre would have to seek permission from a specific cardinal. Unfazed, Kibre, the daughter of movie-set designers, sent a tempting card of introduction up to His Eminence: “Miss Adele Kibre—Hollywood, California.” The cardinal quickly sent for her, saying, “So you are from Hollywood! Come, let’s talk.” Kibre got to see her manuscript, at the price of merely talking for a while with a starstruck European about Hollywood, the “glamour city of the western world.”