The story of the US intelligence agencies, as they started in WW2. At the beginning of the war the US had no military intelligence people. What little had been in place after WW1 was dismantled in the 1920s, so FDR was starting from scratch. Interestingly, the people who put together the 1940 intelligence system chose to focus on people from the humanities. This first version was the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) which after the war became the CIA. The strategy for recruiting academics and librarians to form the first intelligence service was that they wanted people who were used to and familiar with spending hours doing research in libraries and archives. These were not James Bond type spies, these were people spend hours going over newspapers, phone books, railroad time tables and scientific journals, gleaning information that was useful and that was in plain site. Also, being academics helped provide a cover, they were setup as book buyers in Istanbul and Stockholm, which gave them access to people and material that they could use to compile their reports. Also, since they were secretly working for the government, they had a pretty limitless budget to purchase books and other materials.
A fascinating story of the evolution of the intelligence world.
