Tell Your Uncle He's Fighting Twitter Bots in Bangladesh

Musk essentially just pulled the curtain down on everyone at once. He unleashed a global witch hunt.
A new location feature on X is raising questions about prominent MAGA accounts.

MAGA Nation X is based in Eastern Europe and the handle at American is based in Pakistan. From WNYC New York, this is on the media.
I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Loinger.

Also on this week's show, how a school librarian in Louisiana became the target of book banning activists. I'm scared they're going to follow me home.

I'm going to be on this stretch of road where no one's around. And so, yeah, I carry a weapon.
Plus, the untold history of how scholars helped win World War II.

The library is full of stories about spies, but none of those stories are about spies in the library. It's all coming up after this.

From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
And I'm Michael Loewinger.

The MAGA media has been particularly strange lately. Equal parts confusing and confused.
Just one word. Wow.

Kami Mumdani, as the president has been referring to his guest in the Oval Office there for the past several months, looked like best friends with President Trump now.

I mean, Laura Loomer, who's one of Donald Trump's biggest supporters, said after the meeting that Democrats will have a landslide in the midterms because of the meeting. She was just raging.

On the very same day as the Trump Mom Dani rapprochement, the president's former rider die announced she'll be leaving Congress early next year.

Marjorie Taylor Greene's resignation announcement late last night sending shockwaves across the Republican base. The president is again calling his former ally a traitor.

According to one Fox News host, their breakup was over quote-unquote affordability, but we all know that the real reason was Green's decision to push for the release of more Epstein files.

Watching this actually turn into a fight has ripped MAGA apart. Six months ago, the Epstein files were a common crusade for right-wing influencers.
Now, not so much.

They're going to release all this stuff the next week or so, and it's going to be a whole bunch of recycled bull crap. Alex Jones of InfoWars.
Absolute nothing, Burger.

As for Epstein, I do know somebody very, very close to this case who is in a position to know virtually everything. Here's Megan Kelly, who deserves a gold medal for these mental gymnastics.

And this person has told me that Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile. He liked 15-year-old girls.

Suffice to say, there's a lot of cognitive dissonance coursing through the MAGA internet right now.

And the work of telling right-wing audiences what they want to hear has grown more and more difficult.

Last weekend, we learned that a lot of people doing that work on Elon Musk's X are not who they appear to be.

Big accounts, crypto boosters, Trump family fan pages, right-wing news aggregators with hundreds of thousands of followers, many of them, it turns out, are likely click farms based in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and Northern Africa.

X rolled out this new feature called About This Account.

It allows people to click on the profile of a user and see information like what country the account was created in, where the user is currently based, and how many times the username has been changed.

Charlie Warzel is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He's been tracking the anger and confusion among X users as they've learned about the lie at the heart of the platform.

People started clicking around and singling out hyper-partisan accounts, right? Either from the far right or the far left or accounts coming from conflict zones.

And they started noticing that not everyone was, according to this feature, who they said they were. Can you give some examples?

Yeah, there was an account called At Maga Nation X, which had roughly 400,000 followers when I looked it up. And its bio says it is a patriot voice for we the people.

According to the feature, that is based in Eastern Europe. There is an America First account with 67,000 followers based in Bangladesh.

And my favorite, it's very poetic, is that the X handle for at American is according to the feature based in Pakistan.

As somebody who's been covering the kind of weird political internet for a long time, was this surprising? So it's not surprising at all.

If you've been reading the research in the way that I and plenty of my other colleagues who cover social media have.

But what is genuinely surprising, I think, is the scale and also just the nature of it all happening at once, right? These foreign influence operations have been uncovered forever.

And on the internet, they've really been a subject of media scrutiny since my old colleague Craig Silverman at BuzzFeed unveiled this network of Macedonian teens right before the 2016 election that was creating all these hyper-partisan Facebook pages and websites.

That was the era when we called this stuff fake news. And I guess it was more about fake news websites.
And now this is more about just people pretending to be people they're not online. That's right.

And I think that Musk essentially just pulled the curtain down on everyone at once. People on the left who are running around saying, we knew all these MAGA accounts were bogus, right?

The billionaire hedge fund manager, Bill Ackman, is looking at accounts that have been quoted by mainstream news organizations and saying, aha, see,

we knew the news was fake. Do we have a sense of which end of the political spectrum is kind of faring worse?

As a journalist, I want to be very clear that it's tough to get a picture of the scope of this because it's very difficult to just be like independently researching this at Twitter scale.

From what I can see, I do think this is disproportionately harmful to the right wing because Twitter has become such a political weapon for the far right.

Musk, as recently as last week, he was apologizing because there was like left-wing political influencer stuff that was showing up in people's feeds and saying that's a mistake.

Like it's very clear he's tried to tilt the algorithms toward one set.

And so I think just for that reason alone, there is this notion as these accounts are being uncovered that the MAGA movement has really dined out on the fact that there is an incredible online online grassroots effort here, right?

This is the voice of the people, so to speak. And I think seeing that on X hurts them a little more than it hurts the left, a lot of which have moved away from Twitter as a primary place.

There is something, I think, kind of ironic and funny about a social media site that seems to promote very xenophobic personalities and content revealing itself to be exploited by non-Americans.

Tell me about how these revelations are being metabolized.

There is an account that I don't really feel like I need to name that it was relatively popular. It was verified and it was very pro-Israel, very Islamophobic.

Recently, it had been posting a lot calling for Zoran Mondani's deportation, right?

So it turns out that account, according to the tool, has changed its username 15 times and it is based in South Asia.

I'm going to X and I'm trying to verify this and I'm looking at it and I notice that this account is going to other accounts and accusing them of being fake, calling these accounts, quote, Pakistani garbage.

And so what you have is this thing that just like really feels like it exemplifies what X is now, which is this like Russian nesting doll of bullshit, right?

Fake people yelling at fake people for being fake. It is this nothing is true and everything is possible moment.

It's sad to think that people on the other side of the world are willing to LARP as like white supremacists and American Christian nationalists to make a buck. But how profitable is this really?

Like, are people getting rich off of these? I think it's really hard to tell what people are making.

Most cases in these types of programs, it is pennies on the dollar versus, you know, what the actual platforms make.

But in October of 2024, X made a change to this program where the payouts weren't based off of advertising. It was based off of engagement.

How many people were liking, retweeting, and especially commenting, right?

Somebody, I saw one figure, again, like very anecdotal, that if you get like around 1,300 or so replies to a tweet, that you can probably make a couple thousand bucks off of that.

And this idea back in October of 2024 was roundly criticized by people. This is the classic Silicon Valley sin, right? Which is creating the conditions where people are optimizing for engagement.

And of course, there is nothing more engaging than outrage.

One thing I don't understand is why would Elon Musk approve this feature, this product? I honestly can't tell you what he might have been thinking here.

I mean, when Elon Musk bought X back in late 2022, he was obsessed with bots, right? He was obsessed with spam.

He said that the platform was absolutely clogged with it, that people were being impersonated rampantly.

I often disagree with Elon Musk's decisions as the owner of X.

I think this is a smart one, right?

Like, I am for transparency on these platforms, but very classically, this was rolled out in X fashion, which is with a lot of grand pronouncement and then in a way in which there were all these like bugs, right?

The biggest problem with the rollout is the fact that there were a whole bunch of false positives or mislabeled accounts. Hank Green, the popular YouTuber, it says his account is based in Japan.

And when I asked him about that on Sunday, he said he'd never been to Japan, right?

So when you have this, these people who actually genuinely have been mislabeled, it does cast doubt on the entire product and makes for even more mayhem.

Okay, so let's just stipulate that an uncomfortably large portion of traffic on X is driven either by bots and or these like engagement slop farm accounts that claim to be one thing and are really another.

But like X is not the most popular social media site in America. It's like the eighth behind YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, Reddit, and Snapchat.

so sure x is chaotic less trustworthy than ever how big of a deal is that

a lot of the media elite and the political elite hang out on x it's a place where by virtue of of habit or because they still feel like they get something out of it It's where this like discussion happens, right?

I mean, the vice president of the United States is posting constantly on X. He's addicted to the site.
He's addicted to the website. Donald Trump used to be addicted to the website.

He now has his own. But I've reported a lot in the last year that the Trump administration uses the main governmental accounts basically to troll their ideological opponents inside the country.

They post memes. They make news.
And I think more than just that, all these political influencers, media personalities, and politicians also take these posts from supposed ordinary accounts, right?

And they hold them up as these examples of ideological dysfunction, corruption, depravity, right? These posts from average people are used as like fodder in the culture war.

Can you give an example of that?

If you remember, Cracker Barrel changed its logo this summer.

I mean, how could I forget?

And those are the biggest news stories of my lifetime. I'm speaking to another terminally online person here.
So

for those of you who aren't addicted to the internet, when Cracker Barrel changed their logo, there was this huge supposed outcry from the far right that this is an example of like DEI politics taking over.

They took the silhouette of the old man out of the logo and they replaced it with some kind of like sanitized, millennial-friendly, modern Cracker Barrel logo. Right.

And again, independent of whether or not you think that that was a good idea, the narrative around this was that the people on the left were basically trying to sterilize, you know, the heritage of this institution and what it represented of like rural life.

Cracker Barrel, a couple of months ago, hired a outside consulting firm, research firm, to try to... dredge up just like how much of this was real or fake, right? This outrage online.

And according to a Wall Street Journal report from October, between 32 and 37%

of the posts that were outraged about this from either side of the political spectrum were supposedly fake accounts. Like this is a very standard way to create culture war.

Assuming that Silicon Valley is not going to have some collective come to Jesus moment where all of these trends are just kind of reversed.

What can the users, the customers, the living data mine vessels? The product. Yeah, the product.
What can we do to help ourselves survive this techno hellscape?

If there is a thing that makes me feel a little bit optimistic, I think it is the idea that these platforms, because of the decisions of their founders, are becoming like genuine failed states, right?

The dream of these platforms or, you know, the thing that felt great back when they were all first announced and we all got on there, the excitement part of that, it's so far gone that what makes me feel optimistic is that

maybe people are going to like vote with their time and their eyeballs and their attention and their accounts and log off.

I've been fascinated by this company and I can't remember the name that makes these pouches that you put your phones in, right?

It was originally so that people, stand-up comedians, didn't have to worry about people like filming their sets or whatever. But those bags are being used in schools now.

There are phone-free bars and concerts and people are having this great time. And, you know, one reaction to that is, oh man, that's just like so sad.
A really pathetic indictment of our culture.

And the other is like,

are these like the tiny ways, these tiny little, you know, fractures that all kind of come together to cause whatever it is to break a little bit?

And I really feel like if there's a way to be optimistic about this, it's that people aren't stupid.

And after a while, they're going to realize the temperature of the water they're swimming in and be like, I got to get out of the pool. Oh, I really hope you're right, Charlie.
Thanks so much.

Thanks for having me. Charlie Warzel is a staff writer at The Atlantic and host of the podcast, Galaxy Brain.

Coming up, what to do when people who think you're corrupting their kids come after you, locked and loaded.

This is on the media.

The headlines never stop, and it's harder than ever to tell what's real, what matters, and what's just noise. That's where Pod Save America comes in.

I'm Tommy Vitor, and every week I'm joined by fellow former Obama aides John Favreau, John Lovett, and Dan Pfeiffer to break down the biggest stories, unpack what they mean for the future of our democracy, and add just enough humor to stay sane along the way.

You'll also hear honest, in-depth conversations with big voices in politics, media, and culture like Rachel Maddow, Gavin Newsome, and Mark Cuban that you won't find anywhere else.

New episodes drop every Tuesday and Friday with deep dives every other weekend. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, watch on YouTube, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts for ad-free episodes.

This is on the media. I'm Michael Loewinger.
And I'm Brooke Gladstone. The once flourishing book banning movement actually took a hit nationwide in local school board races earlier this month.

School board candidates backed by teachers' unions swept races across Colorado last night. In Pennsylvania, Democrats flipped at least two dozen school board seats.
In Ohio, they won 18 of 22 races.

In Minnesota, 94% of candidates backed by the National Education Association won. In Akron, two Moms for Liberty-aligned incumbents were ousted.

For the first time in recent years, SciFair ISD will not have a super-majority conservative board of trustees after this week's election.

Those wins provide a sliver of hope for librarians across the country who've been targeted and harassed by activist groups like Moms for Liberty, who seek to remove long lists of books from library shelves.

A documentary released this year, The Librarians, follows some of those librarians' tribulations. From Florida.
We got the list of these books are to be removed immediately.

I wrote an email back and just asked, could you please provide us with the reason why each of these books is being removed?

I was removed from my library for asking questions. To Texas.
We were gonna pull books off the shelves. It's the transgender, LGBTQ, and the sexuality in books.
To New Jersey.

I see the kid emerge from the stacks holding Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison. 24 hours later, that student's mother was standing in front of the Board of Education.

and calling me a pornographer, pedophile, and groomer of children. And Louisiana.
In our parish, we have the highest concentration of KKK, Aryan Nation, those type of groups.

In September, we spoke to school librarian Amanda Jones from Livingston Parish, Louisiana. In 2021, she was awarded one of her profession's highest honors, school librarian of the year.

In 2022, she found herself in the crosshairs of culture war after she spoke up at her public library board meeting.

I talked about how libraries already have policies and procedures that if anyone doesn't like a book in a library, whether it's school or public, there are processes in place.

After the meeting, two men she didn't know created memes about her that circulated all over the internet, including by family and friends.

And one meme said that I advocate the teaching of anal sex to 11-year-olds. The other meme was a picture of me that had a circle that looked like a target around my face.

And that post identified me as a school librarian and where I worked and insisted that I give pornography and erotica to six-year-olds.

They circulated all over the state that weekend and then by the next week, it was all over the country. It was excruciating.

I eventually had to take a leave of absence from work for debilitating panic attacks that I had never had before. I was losing chunks of hair.

I lost 50 pounds over the next few months from the stress of it all.

I had a little pity party for a few days, but then I woke up that third or fourth day with just a burning rage at these men and what they were doing and saying about me and a burning rage at people

that I had stood up for that were saying these awful things about me. And so I decided to stick up for myself and fight back.
And how did you do that?

I filed a defamation lawsuit against these two men. It is still ongoing today.
It's been three years.

Then they turned around and said I was filing the lawsuit to keep sexually explicit books in the children's section of the library, which is not what the lawsuit is about. You know, just lies.

What's at stake here? Lives are at stake. Children's lives.
People tell me I'm exaggerating. It's hyperbolic.
It's not. I've taught for 25 years.
I've taught thousands of students.

And I have had many, many students who have grown up. and taken their own lives.
Over two dozen. I stopped counting at around 20 because it it was too heartbreaking

and they generally fall into two categories. They're either veterans that served our country and weren't given resources when they returned or they're members of the LGBTQ community.

Almost every single former student that I know of that has taken their own life fall into one of those two categories. To me, both of those reasons are preventable.

And so I do raise money every year for disabled American veterans, but I thought that what I could do for maybe mitigating some of this in our community would be to make sure that kids are represented in the books, in our public library, in our school library, and make sure they can see themselves and feel seen and heard and represented.

Students have spoken to you about what certain books have meant to them over the years. Oh, yes.
I teach middle school, so they're not the most talkative, forthcoming bunch.

But a lot of former students, yeah, in their 20s and 30s, one student right after this happened wrote me and said, I was thinking of taking my life and you gave me a book that made me feel like there was other people like me.

And I decided to live for one more day. And, you know, that's powerful.
One of my former students was substituting in our school. She stopped by the library to come talk to me.

She hadn't been in our school library in 10 years. And she walked around.
And within minutes, she said, you know, Miss Jones, this library's changed so much. I see books with people that look like me.

I see brown characters on the covers of these books. I never saw that when I went to the school.
I want to preface. I was not the librarian at that time.

It made me tear up.

There's a study by the Human Rights Coalition that found that amid all of the fears of being unsafe at school, that nine out of ten kids feel safest in the school library. They do.

I want 10 out of 10 kids at my school to feel safe and loved and seen and that they can come to the library without judgment and just relax and be who they are. That's very important.

It's a huge responsibility and I don't want to let these kids down.

You've mentioned their safety several times during this conversation. How about yours?

Well, I generally feel unsafe most of the time. Tell me why.
Describe what you've encountered.

Getting a death threat saying that they know where you live and work will change you forever.

It was the work part that got me.

My fear is that someone will come after me and that in the process, children will be harmed.

I don't think I could ever live with myself if that happened and I know it wouldn't be my fault, but I think about that almost daily. Tell me about guns.

When I go to library board meetings, I have to travel through very rural areas, wooded areas. I mean, I'm by myself a lot of these times.
I'm scared. They're going to follow me home.

I'm going to be on this stretch of road where no one's around.

And so, yeah, I carry a weapon and I do sleep with a shotgun under my bed because I have a teenager that I want to protect if someone breaks into my home.

So the documentary shows the connection between all of these movements to ban books or censor them or move them across the country from where you live in Louisiana to Texas to Florida, even New Jersey.

We learned that some of the people behind these campaigns have connections to the Christian nationalist movement.

Among them, Dan and Ferris Wilkes, billionaire oil tycoons who've donated lots of money to politicians and conservative media outlets. Here's a clip of Ferris from the documentary.
A male-on-male

or a female-on-female is against nature. So this lifestyle is a predatorial lifestyle in that they need your children and strike people having kids to fulfill their sexual habits.

They want your children.

The cornerstones of our government are crumbling and starting to come apart. And it's because of the lack of morality, the lack of belief in our Heavenly Father.

There's also a company, Patriot Mobile, that's been financing these book censoring groups. Here's a clip from one of their meetings.

God takes what the devil meant to harm us and he turns it into good. He blesses us with it.
Every time we're attacked at Pedro Mobile, our sales just go through the roof. We increase our sales.

And so what does increasing our sales mean? It means we can give more money back to organizations like Moms for Liberty.

How have you seen that play out in your town, in your state? They're apparently not worshiping the same God I am.

That's not Christianity. So I created an organization called Livingston Parish Library Alliance.

We've been tracking campaign donations and we have noticed that when politicians specifically speak out about the library and insist, you know, there's sexually explicit materials or whatever, we've noticed an uptick in donations.

They play on people's fears that there's these evildoers coming after your children. And where are those donations coming from? It's a a dark money non-profit extremist group.

They don't live or work in my community that have entered my community working with local politicians to create this fear so these politicians can get votes, power, and money.

The lady that originally on our library board started all of this nonsense, who is now on our parish governing because we're parishes and not counties in Louisiana, it catapulted her into a higher elected position.

Her husband formed a PAC, and the Koch brothers have donated over $60,000 to their PAC.

It's all money and power. In the first public meeting where you spoke out, there were out-of-town activists trying to get books moved in your community.

How big a role generally do out-of-town activists play?

The American Library Association, they put out a state of libraries report every year, and last year they reported that I think it was 72% of book challenges and all of these things that are happening are from political focus groups.

There's a pastor from Texas that travels all over the country to talk about the porn in the libraries where he doesn't live. There's a man that's filed thousands of challenges in Florida schools.

He doesn't have a child in those schools. That's not an organic concern.
I don't fault a parent for filing a legitimate challenge against a book. But these people, they're not reading these books.

They're finding lists online and they're just filling out these challenges. They're just trying to cause chaos and so distrust in our library systems.

There was some reporting a couple years back that Moms for Liberty's influence was waning. They'd run a number of candidates for school boards who lost.
Do you see this movement dying down at all?

It depends on where you're at in the country because these are such local fights. And so in areas like Texas and Florida, where it started, it's been going on a lot longer.

We're starting to see the pendulum switch back to normalcy. But there's there's also been lawsuits won in those states.
Lawsuits against school systems that are banning books.

There's been some pretty large lawsuits in Florida. Penguin Random House has been fighting the fight.
Several authors, Peter Parnell, Justin Richardson, George M.

Johnson, have been fighting back against book bans and winning in court. That's helping states like Florida.

Then you've got states like Arkansas that were a little slower to start the book banning movement. And so they're just getting into the heat of it right now.

And you've got states like Missouri that was a little behind Texas and Florida. And so some states are swinging back and some are just getting started.

You've also said that the problem starts at the top, that it's dependent on who's president.

When Donald Trump was inaugurated in January, he almost immediately had the U.S. Department of Education post that they were ending the Biden book ban hoax.

And so everyone's like, see, it is a hoax. That's not happening.
People in my community believe everything he says.

And I wrote an article for Time last year that said the presidency was going to determine the fate of libraries.

And I was right because the minute he got into office, he fired the Librarian of Congress and almost completely gutted the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the national organization that helps all of the libraries in the United States.

I know Louisiana, just the libraries alone get $2.7 million to help run our state library.

And our state library helps all of the rural parishes in Louisiana that can't afford some of the things like we're talking Wi-Fi in areas that don't have internet service access.

We're talking helping people print. We're talking ESL classes and career advice and law help and all of these resources that people don't sometimes realize that libraries do.

Amanda, I want you to sit back here for a second and see if you can remember the moment when you decided you wanted to be a librarian.

Oh, I remember it exactly.

And I don't like to give her credit for it, but when I was in college, and I had kind of lost that love of reading, I watched the Rosie O'Donnell show while I was waiting for a class one day, and she had on this up-and-coming author, J.K.

Rowling. Rosie O'Donnell just kept talking on and on about these Harry Potter books.
And so I went and checked out the first three, read them in their entirety twice that week.

That day that I finished reading the whole series for the second time, I went and got special permission as an undergrad to start taking library science classes as an undergrad.

But why? I mean, you could have just become a reader again. I just love reading so much.
And I realize that not every kid does.

Not every kid is going to be a reader, but I can try to show them the right book because once they become readers, it opens them up to a whole new world, especially in areas like mine where people don't have a lot of money.

They're not going to be able to travel the world, but they can adventure through books and they can learn and they they can grow.

And books do save lives and books do make us more empathetic, kind human beings. And we could use a lot more of that in this world.

And you're going on tour and you said you're still scared. That hasn't gone away.
No, it hasn't.

I often request security at events, but I'm starting to feel like maybe it doesn't matter how much security you have. If someone wants to come after you, they're going to come after you.

And so that's very scary.

Amanda, thank you very much. Thank you for having me.
Amanda Jones is a school librarian and author of the book, That Librarian, The Fight Against Book Banning in America.

Earlier this month, she settled her defamation case with one of her accusers for a dollar and a public apology. I said that she advocates for giving age-inappropriate materials to children.

I said that she advocated for the teaching of anal sex to 11-year-olds. Those statements were not true.
The librarian's documentary is currently playing in theaters across the country.

Coming up, the daring do of librarians in wartime. This is on the media.

The headlines never stop, and it's harder than ever to tell what's real, what matters, and what's just noise. That's where Pod Save America comes in.

I'm Tommy Vitor, and every week I'm joined by fellow former Obama aides Jon Favreau, John Lovitt, and Dan Pfeiffer to break down the biggest stories, unpack what they mean for the future of our democracy, and add just enough humor to stay sane along the way.

You'll also hear honest, in-depth conversations with big voices in politics, media, and culture like Rachel Maddow, Gavin Newsom, and Mark Cuban, that you won't find anywhere else.

New episodes drop every Tuesday and Friday with deep dives every other weekend. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, watch on YouTube, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts for ad-free episodes.

This is On the Media. I'm Micah Lewinger.
And I'm Brooke Gladstone. We're living in history all the time.
Nevertheless, sometimes seem more historic than usual.

Our freedom of expression and even the facts of our own history have come under siege, along with our archives, museums, universities, and libraries.

But history could tell us, if we chose to listen, that at times the very future of the world has depended on these very institutions.

Case in point, historian Elise Graham, professor at Stony Brook University, delved into the moment when the U.S.

government, staring into the maelstrom of the Second World War, was in desperate pursuit of historians, librarians, artists, and academics, a pursuit led by what was then called the Office of Strategic Services and later the CIA.

Graham describes in her gripping history book and dagger how scholars became unlikely spies during World War II.

And she argues that without this unheralded corps of peculiar recruits, that war might very well have been lost.

I spoke to Graham earlier this year.

The library is full of stories about spies, but none of those stories are about spies in the library.

You say that the war was won on the front lines, but it was won with books?

We often think of World War II as the Physicists' war. It was finally won by a bunch of physicists in New Mexico who dropped an atomic bomb.
That itself was a successful misinformation campaign.

How so?

In early 1945, a fellow named Henry DeWolf Smythe was called into an office in Washington and asked if he would write this book that was about a new kind of weapon that the U.S. was developing.

It was published by Princeton University Press about a week after the bomb was dropped. It explained how the U.S.
made made the bomb.

It told the Oppenheimer story that you see it in the movies, where a group of shaggy-haired physicists figured out how to split the atom and all of this stuff.

And the thing is, the physics of building an atomic bomb is, in some respects, the least important part.

More important, if you actually want to make the thing explode, is the chemistry, the metallurgy, the engineering that were left out of the story.

The book was published the way it was so that it would satisfy people's curiosity, but not give other countries countries the information that you actually need to build a bomb.

It was a misinformation campaign, the very last one of the war, and the most successful because it still utterly dominates the way that we think about how the war was won.

This wasn't just the physicists' war, it was also the historian's war, the book collector's war, the artists' war, the professors' war. The war was fought on battlefields, but it was won in libraries.

You know, we think of James Bond, we think of Jason Bourne, suave or brutal, but you show that the OSS's research and analysis branch were recruiting people who were very different.

So these spies, these librarians and professors during World War II, they were chosen precisely because they would be overlooked.

A lot of them went undercover, and nobody suspected them of being spies. Rumor has it that to this day, the CIA does recruiting at the annual American Library Association Conference.

Now, you touch on so many characters in your enthralling narrative, but there are three you return to again and again. Joseph Curtis, Sherman Kent, and Adele Khyber.

Your book starts very cinematically with the recruitment of the very unlikely Curtis.

People who were in charge of recruiting spies into the OSS at the beginning of the war drew on spy stories to tell them what to do.

So someone came up to Curtis and said, listen, you need to go to the Yale Club in New York City tomorrow. Wear a purple tie.
You're going to see a man who's smoking a cigarette.

When he sees you, he'll put it out. He has an important message for you.
And that's how he got recruited.

But why Curtis in particular? Curtis was a professor of early modern literature.

And Curtis was the sort of guy who wouldn't be able to get the attention of a waiter if students didn't remember him later on.

If you're going to send someone behind enemy lines as a spy, it is useful that this is someone who nobody would look at twice.

Not the kind of guy who's wearing a tuxedo and everybody knows takes his martini shaken, not stirred. But why was he assessed as having the right stuff?

When you go undercover, it's important that you be as competent in your cover as you are in the spy craft.

Joseph Curtis's cover was going to be he was going to Istanbul in order to collect books for the Yale Library, which meant he had to be competent in collecting books.

Of course, in the meanwhile, he was tracking down German spies and turning them into double agents, but that's definitely not the kind of thing you would expect someone like Joseph Curtis to be doing.

So he was sent to supposedly neutral Istanbul just as whatever spying that was going on there by the Allies was falling apart.

The OSS branch in Istanbul was falling apart because the guy in charge of it thought that he was in a James Bond story. He was sleeping with his sources and his sources turned out to be enemy agents.

His cover was blown so thoroughly that every time he walked into one of the city's nightclubs, the band would start playing a song called Boo Boo Baby, I'm a Spy.

That was letting McFarland. Curtis actually tracked him down.
He got tired of not being contacted. And maybe McFarland was hanging on to his own jobs by his fingernails.

People were getting fired from the Istanbul outposts left and right.

Whatever the case, Curtis was given a surprising new job, which was to build a counterintelligence operation that would find enemy agents, turn them into double agents, and would also spread propaganda, rumors, misinformation.

He turned out to be surprisingly good at it. I know that there's a lot of lying and backstabbing in academia, but this is something else altogether.

Tell me how these unlikely agents were trained.

The Americans had these camps with tents in national parks where they would learn how to do quick draws like cowboys.

So you'd be standing in a muddy field and there would be a fighting instructor teaching you how to use ordinary objects as weapons.

You'd learn how to use somebody's trousers to restrain him or how to fold a newspaper in such a way that it turns into a deadly weapon.

You would learn, if you were a woman, how to use a makeup compact as a knuckle duster. The assumption was that you'd be out in the field with only your wits to protect you.

I was really struck by the meticulous creation of persuasive pocket litter.

As a general rule, you can have either a weapon or a cover, but not both, because if the Gestapo catch you with a gun or a knife, you're not going to be able to persuade them that you're an ordinary civilian.

Everything on your person, including the stuff in your pockets, should agree with your cover. Your breath should smell like the toothpaste in the area that you're supposed to be from.

If there are grains of tobacco in your pockets, they need to be tobacco that is sold in the place where you're from. I mean, it was really, really specific.

So, let's move on to another notable character you return to again and again, Sherman Kent. Less Casper milquetoast and more Humphrey Bogart, maybe.

So, he was a tweed-wearing history professor at Yale. He was brilliant, but he was always looking for a fight.

When he was teaching, he would throw chalk past the heads of his students, which they don't let us do anymore. So, when he gets recruited, he goes to a spy training camp.

He learned how to throw daggers and he became so good at it for the rest of his career. He was famous for being able to throw a dagger better than a Sicilian.

That was the phrase that was said about him. He didn't end up going into the field.
He wound up going to Washington where he worked in intelligence analysis, also known as the Cherborn Division.

This is professors of literature and history and economics who are pulling out of novels and newspapers strategic intelligence that can be used to fight the war.

But all the work of those professors and librarians would have been nothing if Sherman Kent hadn't been their spokesman.

What he was trying to persuade the military of was that most of what an intelligence agency needs to know can come from public sources. Paper can be more effective than bombs.

It could tell the right reader what factory should be bombed to stop the production of ball bearings.

It's more useful to stop the production of ball bearings than to stop the production of fighter planes because ball bearings are used to create fighter planes. How do you know what factory?

By comparing minute fluctuations in railroad rates and then you find its address by looking at a street directory.

It was really adventurous and imaginative reading in the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress that allowed the Allies to come to these insights. And now talk about Adele Kuiber.

So Kuiber had, without knowing it, been trading all of her life to be a spy.

She had a PhD in classics from the University of Chicago, and because women couldn't really go into the professoriate in these years, she became a professional archive hunter, hopping from archive to archive across Europe, earning money by taking photographs of rare texts for scholars back home in the States.

Khyber became the most productive document acquisitions agent working for the Allies. She was working undercover in supposedly neutral Sweden.

Sweden could continue to be neutral as long as no spies operated in Sweden. So Khyber had to work completely undercover, and the Swedish police had trained with the Gestapo.

So this was actually still a very dangerous place to be a spy.

She acquired and sent home on microfilm a massive number of documents that went all over the world on behalf of the Allies, including into the library at a little place in New Mexico called Los Alamos.

In Adele, you actually have a kind of movie spy.

She used charm, she used guile, she also used the technique you describe of saying something wrong in order to be mansplained, the secret reality.

Khyber was aware that she was the sort of woman who appealed to men who think two things at the same time.

One, that they're attracted to smart women, and two, that they're smarter than the women they're attracted to, which is a very dangerous combination.

Kuiber changed her persona to suit the people that she was talking to. So when she was trying to get documents from professors, oh, I myself got a PhD at the University of Chicago.

When she talked to people who were sympathetic with the Germans, she seems to have represented herself as being sympathetic with the Germans. She reflected what they wanted.

You also found that a lot of other women who worked for the OSS were left out of these histories, and that was about 35%

of the OSS.

A lot of the work that these spies did revolved around changing the narrative. One very effective tactic involved, quote, whispering.
So whispering was a sub-specialty of propaganda.

Now, you might think that spreading rumors means talking as loudly and widely as possible, but that's not true. The coordination of loose lips had to be as tight as the coordination of special forces.

I'll tell you how it worked. The Allies put together rumors at something called the Rumor Factory.
The head of this section had the enviable title Master Whisperer.

And the whispers would go out through strategic networks. In a given region, a chief whisperer would organize the whispers, give them to agents.
They would give them to sub-agents.

Mostly sub-agents were ordinary civilians. You could be a reliable sub-agent in a propaganda network and not even know it.
So the Rumor Factory classified whispers in two categories.

One, smokescreen rumors that were designed to deceive the enemy about the Allied war position or the Allies' intentions. And two, rumors that were designed to attack the morale of the enemy.

There's one that goes, this is 1941 in Germany. A woman in black committed suicide with a revolver on the steps of the Reich Chancellery, which is Hitler's headquarters in Berlin.

She held in her hand a newspaper announcing the death of her husband and son. This is to make people think about the despair of the German people.

Of course, one of the most famous coups pulled off by this corps of irregulars was Operation Mincemeat.

British intelligence dressed up a corpse as a Royal Marine to deceive the Germans about an upcoming invasion.

Operation Mincemeat convinced the Germans to believe in a coincidence that was on its face ridiculous simply because it was a compelling story that this British Marine fell in the ocean carrying a suitcase of plans that showed the Allies planned to invade Greece instead of Sicily.

The British worked up a whole background for this guy. You know, he had pocket litter.

He had a photograph of his fiancée, Pam, an overdraft slip from the bank showing he had spent too much on the engagement ring for Pam. And they dropped the corpse so that it would wash up in Spain.

Whom the Germans trusted. They successfully laundered the operation into a trustworthy source, which was also done with whispers.

If you could get a whisper printed in a small newspaper, then a big respectable newspaper would print that the small newspaper was saying it, and then suddenly it was respectable.

This is something that tells us about how important it is to teach people how stories work. But do we have that kind of literacy about stories today?

I mean, you say stories won the the war, but the humanities now are under attack. Before the war, U.S.
libraries were underfunded.

They had very thin collections compared to what was available in Europe. After the war, both university libraries and public libraries were invested in heavily by the U.S.

government, which was determined to never be caught so badly lacking again. The U.S.

had learned the value of libraries, not just as centers of community and education, but as something that's integral to national security. These are some of the lessons that the U.S.

self-consciously brought away from the the war. Of course, 80 years have passed since then, and we've largely forgotten that lesson.

In your book, you highlight the world-changing contributions of the people that Hitler despised, the members of the French resistance that destroyed critical railways that helped turn the war, and all the people that he rejected who wound up being responsible for turning the tide of the war.

Yes, I mean, Hitler, he had an authoritarian regime, and the thing about authoritarians is they have an incredibly limited outlook, an incredible need to conform, a conviction that anybody who's competent must share their exact way of thinking, which is a huge weakness.

I wrote a piece for the Globe and Mail a while ago saying, authoritarianism is a catastrophic military disadvantage. The U.S.

military and others have conducted tons of studies showing, for instance, that diversity is a big military advantage.

It improves things ranging from resilience to unit cohesion and more broadly, agile military thinking because they value outside perspectives.

During World War II, Hitler and his cronies were constantly hobbled by the fact that they excluded violently so many people who wound up contributing marvelously to the Allied side of the fight.

So anyway, I write this piece and then a very belligerent guy writes to me and says, what about the Spartans?

And I guarantee that everything he thinks he knows about the Spartans, he got from the movie 300.

The stories we tell matter.

A ton of guys watched that movie and came away from it thinking, well, the best fighters are a small group of guys who have 12 packs and don't wear shirts, but in a totally straight way, and fight against these dark-skinned Persians using the power of their own conformity.

The stories we tell matter. Of course, the 300 guys should make their movie, but it's useful to have historians out there too talking about how it really worked.

All of these things are, in the end, stories.

It's important to have a plurality of stories out there so that we can arrive at a better and more useful truth, including about what happened during World War II and how we won it.

Elise Graham is a historian and professor at Stony Brook University and the author of Book and Dagger. Thanks so much for being here.
Thanks for having me.

That's it for this week's show. On the Media is produced by Molly Rosen, Rebecca Clark Callender, and Candice Wong.
Travis Mannon is our video producer.

Our technical director is Jennifer Munson with engineering from Jared Paul. Eloise Blondio is our senior producer.
And our executive producer is Katya Rogers. On the media is produced by WNYC.

I'm Brooke Gladstone. And I'm Michael Ellinger.