Adele Kibre: Academic Scholar and Wartime Intelligence Agent
When the United States declared war on Japan on Dec. 8, 1941, the day after Pearl Harbor was attacked, the country had only a bare bones foreign intelligence operation. There was no CIA and no National Security Agency. There was only the six-month-old Office of Strategic Services (OSS) -- a small agency led by Colonel William Donovan, a decorated soldier and arguably the country’s top spy at the time.
The OSS had spies and secret agents planted abroad, but cultivating sources and infiltrating enemy circles was risky and took time. And in 1941, after two years of the Nazis on a tear through Europe, time was running out for the Allies.
Like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Donovan knew the war couldn’t be won by military might alone. The deciding factor would come down to which side had the best intel and information and knowing how to capitalize on it. Under pressure to come up with a strategic plan, Donovan turned to the Library of Congress, a move that led to a lot of head scratching. After all, weren’t librarians just bookworms who spent their days in the stacks? How would they be able to ferret out sensitive information in the field?
But on further thought, who better than librarians and researchers, experts in investigating, collecting, organizing and analyzing data, to pursue information that could win a war? Based on that premise, the two government agencies proposed to create the Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publication or IDC. Donovan shared the idea with Roosevelt. Two weeks after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the IDC was created by an executive order.
The IDC’s mission was two-fold: the story told to the public, was that the work was cultural and noble: to acquire antique and valuable books and printed material that could be destroyed in war and put them into the Library of Congress for safe-keeping and posterity. But the real and underlying goal was to gather any and all material printed or published in Germany, so that it could be scrutinized for clues about what the Nazis were doing and planning to do.
This was “soft” intelligence extrapolated from “open source” materials: mainly books, periodicals, and newspapers but also consumer and industrial catalogues, railway timetables, technical manuals, scientific papers, summaries of factory outputs and even propaganda fliers. Mining the information and reading between the lines for information required a different level of intelligence gathering than codebreaking or signals intelligence but would become as important.
The IDC was an elite intelligence band of brothers but it included one woman, Adele Kibre, a 43-year-old classical scholar who would head IDC’s Stockholm post and become a superstar at her job.
Kibre earned her undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of California at Berkley where she also taught Latin. In 1931, she earned a doctorate in medieval linguistics at the University of Chicago. Fluent in several languages, her intellectual brilliance was never questioned. As a woman in the 1930s, however, she was unique because few women were able to become professors or pursue high level academic careers.
A post-doctoral fellowship at the prestigious American Academy of Rome, brought Kibre to Italy. After completing the program in 1932, she stayed on to continue her research. To support herself, she did research for two male professors at the University of Chicago. Her work included photographing rare manuscripts using 35mm cameras. Over time, she gained a working knowledge of microfilm – a new technology that used miniature cameras to capture images at a reduced scale, making it possible to store vast amounts of material while taking up a fraction of the space of normal photography.
Nine years later in 1941, her intellect and microfilm skills would catch the eye of Eugene Power, an OSS recruiter and early microfilm entrepreneur. He described her as “a real Mata Hari type…who liked to talk about international intrigue and espionage,” according to historian Kathy Peiss in her book, Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe.
Microfilm would be the key to IDC’s success. All agents were trained in microphotography before being deployed to posts in London, Stockholm, Lisbon, Istanbul, Cairo and later Chongqing, China. They would make the rounds of bookstores, newsstands and private collectors, buying up copies and coming back to the office to record the contents on microfilm. The tiny microfilm reels would be shipped on planes bound for Washington D.C. where another team of analysts would comb through the material on microfilm readers.
Adele Kibre had no trouble fitting into this double life. By the 1940s, as war became a real threat throughout the continent, she had lived abroad for more than a decade and as a multi-linguist, Europe was her second home. She already had a network of contacts she could turn to as sources for materials.
Born in Philadelphia in 1898, Adele Kibre became a southern California girl when her parents moved to Hollywood and found success as movie set designers. The glamorous world of films became a backdrop for Adele and her three siblings. One of her sisters would marry a silent film star. But Kibre had a more serious side and was intrigued by the mysteries of the past. She never married and her pivot into the IDC was a temporary detour created by the war. After it was over, she resumed her academic research and continued to expand her credentials in that arena.
Her career in the world of intelligence began in 1934. Peiss says Kibre was at the Vatican Library where she first met researchers using mini cameras to shoot microfilm images of masterpieces of art. Intrigued by the advantages it offered over regular photography, she taught herself how to microfilm her own research.
By June 1942, Kibre was in London for additional microfilm training with the British Ministry of Information before going to Stockholm, Sweden to head up the IDC office. The office was located next door to the offices of the German military attache.
Upon arriving, she was quoted as saying, “there is a colossal amount of material to be microfilmed.” It was just the beginning. For the duration of the war, Stockholm was an intel hotspot. Kibre and her team of six agents were so busy they didn’t have time to develop the film, instead sending raw canisters back to the U.S. for developing.
“Nevertheless,” Peiss writes, “the technical quality was excellent, the coverage of the continental press extensive and her output increased until she was sending microfilm nearly every week…the beginning of an amazing record of accomplishment.” By war’s end, Kibre had produced an astonishing 3000 reels of microfilm.
One of her biggest coups was scoring a copy of Industrie-Compass 1943, a secret directory of German manufacturers and industries with access restricted to German government officials. Known for keeping her methods close to the vest, Kibre never revealed how she obtained a copy. Even her superiors weren’t able to find out.
Resourceful and creative, Kibre also had back channels of communication with resistance groups all over Europe. Their material was censored or banned by German authorities, so much of what Kibre obtained was most likely smuggled into Sweden, a neutral country in the war. She obtained photographs of air raid attacks in Estonia, the liberation of Copenhagen and attacks by resistance teams on German factories and trucks in Denmark.
The efforts of Kibre and her fellow librarian agents were similar but not totally identical to the work of the Roberts Commission better known as the Monuments Men, who sought to preserve art and antiquities from Nazi destruction. Both initiatives involved major campaigns of acquisition that led to more complicated issues of requisition, restitution and reclamation of cultural treasures, issues that are still being resolved today.
The success of the IDC set the stage after the war for a new library field called information science. It also gave birth to a new era in library technology and broadened the goals of research, collection and information retrieval for libraries.
Many of Kibre’s male colleagues became leaders in these new enterprises after the war was over, but Kibre did not. She returned to her old life, living and working in Italy and Spain, hiring herself out as a researcher to assist professors back in the United States.
Private, mysterious and comfortable with her anonymity, Kibre’s last known research was published in 1986. It’s believed that she died in Andalusia, Spain in 1997.
-© Alice Look 2024
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