 Nicholas Reynolds, what a great pleasure it is to welcome you to the National Archives virtually. I want to thank you for coming today and also want to thank the National Archives for showing this book talk. It's such a fascinating topic. Your latest book is Need to Know, World War II and the Rise of American Intelligence. Not only did I find this book brilliantly researched and very deathly written, but also groundbreaking. I mean, out of all the ones that I've read, this is the first one I think I've ever seen that between two covers puts the entire history of the rise and growth of the US intelligence community in one book. There have been plenty of niche histories and Christopher Andrews, of course, the present size only touches on a lot of this, but not as comprehensively or as detailed as yours. So congratulations on such a really groundbreaking piece of history, but also one that's so enjoyable and fun to read. So anyway, as a reader of history, I want to thank you for it. Looking at your background, I mean, it seems to me you're the perfect person to have written a book like this. I mean, not only were you a CIA field operative, but also a CIA historian, Marine Corps infantry officer and historian and a graduate of Swarthmore in history. You have a D. Phil from Oxford in history, and also a law degree from the University of Virginia where you and I first met 40 some years ago. So anyway, welcome. I'm going to ask you two very quick preliminary questions, and then we'll get into the meat potatoes of the book. First is, it's always something that people want to know is, did you write this book for any particular reason? In other words, to fill in this gap that I mentioned that no one had ever quite done this before, or was there some other reason for your doing it? So I like to say I stand on the shoulders of some great historians. You already mentioned Christopher Andrew, a professor at Cambridge in England who has written probably the best single volume on the history of American intelligence for the president's eyes only. Another great historian who I knew at Oxford was David Kahn, and he is the author of The Code Breakers, which in its day, late 60s, early 70s was absolutely groundbreaking. People just had not written books about American code breaking up until that time, and certainly nothing as comprehensive as code breakers. Anyway, David and I stayed friends for years after we initially met, gosh, a long time ago in the 70s, and sometime in the 2000s, excuse me, David commented to me, he says, you know, nobody has ever written a one volume history of American intelligence in World War Two. As you say, Mark, there are a lot of niche histories, a lot of great niche histories of American intelligence in World War Two, but nobody's ever kind of pulled up from 5,000 feet to 25 or 30,000 to try and look at the whole landscape. And so that was my idea here. It's one I took from David, basically, I took his suggestion. And then I launched into it to see what would come out of taking a broader view of American intelligence. The pandemic played a part too, because I had started this research, but I was not 100% sure where it was going to go. And, you know, the lockdown kind of helped me, kind of made me focus as did a series of deadlines. So in the end, we had David Kahn's input. We had, you talked about my background a little bit. The thing I would add to that is I'm a child of World War Two. I was born in 1950, so obviously I don't remember any World War Two, but I certainly remember my parents' stories of World War Two. Neither was a frontline soldier, but they were both very close to the front lines. And little bits of World War Two history would seep into our lives, dinner table conversation, relatives who would show up. We had two uncles, one of them would fought in the Pacific, shot down 17-0s, and in the process lost a toe. And that was it. And the other uncle was unlucky enough to have been in the Hungarian army. So fighting half-heartedly on the wrong side and winding up in captivity in the Soviet Union, which made for a lot of interesting stories and also affected the rest of his life. Every time he ate, he protected his food, and I knew him what, 30 years after the war. So basically, World War Two has been a matter of fascination to me, and so when you combine World War Two and my interest in intelligence, then you get the result is this book. Let's talk about how you researched it. Where did you do the bulk of your research? Well, so I would do this anyway, even if I weren't on the National Archives airwaves. I've been using the National Archives since 1970 when I was an undergraduate. I was already going to the main building there and cranking through microfilms. My eyes are still in pretty good shape, actually, even after cranking those reels. And, you know, we had wonderful, we had the World War Two branch at the Archives was extremely welcoming to graduate students and scholars who were researching the subject. And so I did some of it downtown, but a lot was at College Park, the new location. Well, not so new anymore, but the newer location, which holds the OSS files. And then I have to have a shout out, make a shout out to the FDR Library, which is where I visited in person. But during the pandemic, I was able to use a lot of their collections. They have digitized 800,000 plus pages. And, you know, for somebody working during the during the pandemic, all I can say is, is thank you, thank you, thank you, FDRL. That's so nice to hear. I mean, the men and women of the National Archives, especially the orchestras do a phenomenal job and just think of the history that could not be written without their help. I mean, they really are national treasures. Well, let's get down to it. It's September 1939. Adolf Hitler decides to attack Poland from the west, Joseph Stalin from the east. Where are our intelligence services? So the, that's pretty, the way to answer that is what intelligence services there is. So FDR is informed of the attack by through a phone call that he receives from the American Embassy in Paris, which in turn had received a phone call from the American Embassy in Warsaw as the Germans attack. And when you, when you consider the kind of sophisticated telecommunications and reporting cycles that we have now, that the idea that somebody made a long distance phone call to the president and he picked up, right? He's lying in bed, the phone rings, he picks up. It's the ambassador in Paris, bullet and bullet is saying it started, Mr. President. So the short answer to your question is intelligence assets very, very limited. Some State Department is mostly political reporting and crisis reporting, military intelligence and naval intelligence is basically keeping track of the enemy in a, in a, in the way that you assemble a catalog, you know, what, what units, what ships, where they are, that sort of thing. Moving parts, some in the code breaking department, there's small code breaking departments in the Navy and the Army, they work on the, they work on the National Mall in World War One temporary buildings, which are roughly where the Vietnam Memorial is today, very, very roughly. But this is a handful of people, this is 20, 30, 40 people in each service and they have done phenomenal work given the, given the resources at their disposal, done phenomenal work breaking the Japanese diplomatic code. So that's what we got at the beginning of World War Two. Well, that's, that's not much. You think that's because of our propensity towards isolationism after World War One? I think that's part of it. The problem is that for scholars, here's, here's the issue. If you don't have something, do people write about it? You know, if there's a category missing from, let's say a medical practice, you know, people just don't know about, about a certain kind of virus. Are there articles about that virus? Well, not really. So what we, so it's hard to get a handle on the, on the, on the attitudes. What we can say is that America's had intelligence before since the Revolutionary War. But what happened was they, American intelligence would work during the war. War was over. People would almost everyone would go home after World War One. A few people stayed on, not very many, but basically it was the same pattern that American intelligence downsized dramatically after World War One. And that's really unfortunate because our enemies did not, especially the Japanese and the Germans. Tell me a little bit about the black chamber and Henry Stinson's reaction to. So I actually hold a candle for Stinson who was sort of the grand old man of public service. He was a lawyer, New York lawyer. He was a Republican, actually he was an internationalist. And what is so he was Secretary of War, twice Secretary of State once. And he is the one who shut down the American black chamber around 1930 by saying gentlemen don't read each other's mail. So he comes in the Hoover administration to Washington. There's this little tiny black chamber that operates out of a townhouse in New York. And what they do is they read diplomatic traffic, especially Japanese diplomatic traffic. And there was a set of negotiations with the Japanese and other powers about the size of navies. But then they keep doing it. So their product influences the negotiations. They keep breaking bits and pieces of diplomatic traffic. And when Stinson comes in and he's briefed, his staff were worried that he would do this. When he's briefed, he says, this is impossible. Shut it down. Gentlemen, don't do this. And so this is, but in Stinson's case, it's not, it's not your usual isolationist. So yes, American isolationist would say, what do you need intelligence for? We got two oceans. We don't need to worry about what's going on over there. Stinson's attitude is a little different. Stinson's attitude is we want to build a kind, we want to build trust among the powers. And we don't want to read each other's mail. So he's actually not an isolationist. He's an odd kind of interventionist. And he does change his mind in World War II when he comes back to be Secretary of War. He's in his 70s, right? And FDR asks him to come back to Washington and be part of basically a national unity cabinet. And he says, yes. I mean, what a, of course, I don't want to get into current politics, but we do see older gentlemen in Washington. In those days, I mean, healthcare wasn't as good. And just a strain of, you know, almost continuous service on these guys at the heads of the Department of State, Department of War, Department of the Navy, the Secretary of the Navy has a heart attack in 1944. Just amazed. Anyway, I digress, but Stinson does shut down the black chamber and makes it even harder for America to continue having a residual intelligence core. Let's fast forward to Eva Pearl Harbor and then the attack itself. I mean, was the failure of Pearl Harbor an intelligence failure, or is that right? Because you didn't seem to have any intelligence. Well, so that's a great question. The, so the only thing we're reading is the Japanese diplomatic traffic. And Japanese diplomatic traffic shows the slide to war ever. And the inclines ever steeper. And you can get that by looking at Japanese traffic. What it doesn't show is that we are that the Japanese are going to attack us and where they're going to attack us. You could say the code breaking delivered a general strategic warning. Very general strategic warning. There might be war in the next two weeks. It did not deliver. There will be a Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. Very, very interesting indeed. And of course there was no analytical capability to try to stitch all this stuff together. So it's like ripping cables off an old teleprinter. You know, basically the president and the other decision makers saw the same raw traffic that the Japanese ambassador was seeing. So it would say, you know, close the bank branch in New York, send the ships home, that sort of thing. But nobody, and you only saw it on the day it arrived. And you only saw it for a few minutes because the courier would take it back. And so you'd have to start over again the next day and try and reconstruct in your head what you'd seen in the past couple of weeks. Speaking of raw intelligence, you tell a fascinating anecdote in your book about FDRs handling the raw intelligence and a wastebasket. Can you? True. Much of the news as a late fellow president. I urge viewers to read the book and get all the details. But FDR was not a great, he was a great politician and he had just remarkably refined political skills. But when it came to being a manager and consumer of intelligence, I say he was, he really came up short. So these numbered and the couriers would try and keep track of every piece of paper. They'd be numbered. The courier would have a, he would drop something off. He'd make a note, you know, dropped off page number four and five and six here. And then he would come back and get it. After the president read it, maybe certainly no later than the next morning, probably the same day. And one day they went nuts. They couldn't find it. And it was in the trash can. It was the waste paper basket of Roosevelt's good friend, General Pah Watson, who had just, he had taken a look at it and he tossed it in the trash. Roosevelt seldom focused on any particular piece of intelligence. And part of it was, you know, part of it was his makeup. Part of it was all the things that are going on in Roosevelt's life. He has terrible sinus trouble through most of the war. And his doctor is packing his sinuses with gauze. And while that's happening, people are reading the daily intelligence take to him. So I'll make a pitch here for, if you're a consumer of intelligence, stop everything else you're doing and focus on it for at least five or 10 minutes. And please return it. I'll put it in the trash. Let's talk for a minute about the British influence on the on the creation of the American intelligence community to war too. I mean, how seminal were their contributions. So the British are just absolutely crucial to this story. And the thing to remember is, so we started, we talked about the war starting in 1939. In the spring of 1940, the Germans overrun France and most of the rest of Western Europe. So that leaves Britain almost by itself facing the prospect of the Nazis crossing that 20 miles of ocean between Britain and the continent. And they want help anywhere they can find it. And about the the closest viable set of resources is us. And we're still in a pretty isolationist mode. If you pulled the citizens of the United States, you would find a majority for isolationism and may and then a slightly increasing number who would say, okay, help the British, but stay out of the war. And so what the British are trying to do is create their they're trying to influence public opinion in the United States, and they're trying to get away into the White House, so that they can keep track of what the president is doing and influence him. That's what they did in World War One. They had they one of President Wilson's closest advisors was the British Chief of Station. He had almost unfettered access to the president, and he would come in and very politely give him, you know, oh, that's a good idea, Mr. President, or why don't you try a little bit of this instead of that. And so that's what the British are trying to do. They they pushing the Americans to create some kind of intelligence network that they can work with. Right, and includes people such as Winston Churchill, Ian Fleming's involved. Right. Stevenson. Yep. Raven Trepid. It was quite an all out effort. All right, let's fast forward up till 1942. I mean, in June, we have Midway and then November, we have operation for both huge intelligence successes, but changed. I mean, how are we able to sell them in a very short time. So one of one of them is one of them is kind of an old fashioned success, sort of the last and glorious gasp of the old ways of the US Navy and the other is a look into the future. So Midway is the guy in the basement at Pearl Harbor, portrayed by Hal Holbrook in the movie Midway is wearing a smoking jacket and bathroom slippers. That did in fact happen. And what he does is pull together through the limited resources at his disposal. He pulls together a variety of threads and says the Japanese are going to Midway. So it's not like we develop the sophisticated intelligence machine between Pearl Harbor and Midway that enabled him to do that. It's like we got the best possible performance out of this ancient machine run by, you know, I love these guys, these sort of individualists who succeed despite the system. So that's Midway, it works. We, it's a, it's a near run thing. It could have gone the other way. There was rough parody in the number of carriers. And we sink for Japanese carriers, just a phenomenal achievement that changes the course of the war in the Pacific from then on. In Europe, it is torches our first invasion, transatlantic invasion. We invade the in North Africa, where there are a lot of French territories and OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, set up more or less the way the British wanted it. And what they do is provide information on the lay of the land. Some of it is tactical information, a little bit is political. Not much is really strategic. But they tell the people, they tell the landing force what to accept, what to expect when it hits the beach. And they, they provide a little bit of a guide to the political, the political scene there in North Africa. Just for our viewers who may not know, let's talk a little bit more about the OSS. That's one, I think most people are familiar with. And could you describe how it was, I mean, it's how it was founded and the role that, that, that while Bill Donovan played on that. I mean, you have a wonderful line in your book. I'm going to read it here. I've got it marked. It says, OSS was a while, once in a lifetime, assemblage of men and women who signed up to fight him. A while to send it to me. Can you get into that a little bit? Absolutely. Yeah, so, so while, while Bill, first of all, is kind of an interesting guy in his own right. And he is a Wall Street lawyer. He got rich during the depression. So if you're a lawyer in the depression, people still have to come to you to liquidate their firms and consolidate and bankruptcies and all that. And so that's how Donovan and leisure made its money. But not even in World War One was, he's already pretty old for, for ground combatties in his mid to late 30s. But he just, and he's got almost no experience. He's been a reservist in a, in a regiment that that's a famed for social events and parades. And, and, and he just has a knack for ground combat and distinguishes himself in the trenches in Europe against the Medal of Honor and a couple of other senior awards. And then, you know, that's back to peacetime and every time, every time peace breaks out while Bill seems to get a little restless. It seems like he's always looking for the next fight, the next war, a little bit like Ernest Hemingway actually. And World War Two comes. He's very enthusiastic about getting involved even before the United States gets involved. And with, with British help, he cobbles together this thing called OSS, Office of Strategic Services. And he populates it with people he knows initially, right? You've been a lawyer on Wall Street for a few decades. You, you worked in Washington. You got this great Rolodex. You could start calling people on your Rolodex. Please come in, please, please join us. And then for, for analysts, they, they, so they got lawyers, journalists. They've got, and then they start getting the academics, Harvard, Yale, grudgingly Princeton, very grudgingly anything but the IVs. It's a wonderful line by one of the leading analysts who said, yeah, we had 10 from Harvard, five from Yale, and one from some other university whose name I can't remember. So that gives you a sense of who initially populates it. It's, it's nickname is Oso Social OSS, or also Oso Secret. As the war goes on, it becomes a broader organization. There's a lot of uniform people there because you can't, you know, there's, there's not enough people on. There's a lot of people on Donovan's Rolodex, but not enough for a agency that peaks at 13,000 and 1943-44. Right. How critical do you think the OSS was to our victory? Controversial. So it made a respectable contribution, but nothing like the contribution of signals intelligence. Or even aerial reconnaissance. And so, you know, this is, this is what I argue is the benefit of looking at, looking at the whole picture, looking at the landscape from 35, 30,000 feet. You see that, you see one kind of intelligence consistently outperforming the other, and that signals intelligence. OSS makes, as I say, a respectable contribution, but the key contribution is always signals intelligence and, and then other forms of intelligence like, like aerial reconnaissance. How critical was our intelligence to what happened in D-Day, June 6, 1944? I argue it's, it's absolutely critical. And, and we got a couple of windfalls from signals intelligence. One was the report of the Japanese ambassador who was previously the Japanese military attache in Berlin, and he gets tours of the fortifications along the Atlantic coast and sends these beautiful detailed professional reports to Tokyo. 30 some pages, and you know, and it's, it's, it's written in, it's, it's in a language, a military language that not a diplomatic language is not like a we could see they're making a lot of effort. No, it's like there's five guns here, there's four guns there, this is strong, that's very strong. And so the people who broke the Japanese code, the Japanese diplomatic code see this and they go, oh my God, this is fabulous. And they, they make a pamphlet out of it and start circulating it to General Marshall, General Eisenhower and whatnot. So I, I say, you know, before at D-Day intelligence is absolutely key. D-Day wasn't easy, right? There were some, there were some tough, there were some really tough moments. And there were some, there were some German emplacements that were still firing the next day. But without that, without the intelligence that they had, it could well have been a shambles. All right, let's talk for just a minute about the Jaguar Hoover and the FBI. What was the FBI's simple role? Or do I know they were tasked domestically with countering subversion and they did a good job countering the Nazis and the Japanese saboteurs, but did they also have an overseas role? They had a, they had a self-appointed overseas role. And it starts in the, it starts around, it starts before Pearl Harbor, 40, 41, around there. And Hoover says, you know, we can do, we can do foreign intelligence as well. We can, the FBI can be a one-stop shop for American intelligence, sort of like the, he wouldn't say the NKVD, but the Soviet intelligence does a lot of things. I mean, it guards your borders. It runs prison camps. It does collect information from abroad, collects information domestically. So I'm not saying Hoover wanted to run the borders or run camps, but his idea was we can do a lot in the FBI. And so he wanted to have the law, a straight law enforcement, which we're familiar with, sort of the John Dilliger fighting crime. Then he wanted to do counterintelligence, capture the Nazi spies who came to the United States, and a fair number did. And then he said, well, we can go overseas in Latin America and we can get political information about what's going on in Latin America. I know he and Donovan did not get along well. That's putting it mildly. They were, at the start of the war, they were civil to each other. They were rivals rather than enemies. They were always kind of trying to keep track of one another. Okay, what's he doing now? What's he up to? What should I do? By the end of the war, they're pretty close to enemies. Right. Yeah, and that rivalry continued for quite a long time after both men were dead, interestingly enough, in the CIA and the FBI. Hal, do you think we had more intelligence successes against the Germans or the Japanese? Oh boy. That's a good question. So if you ask President Roosevelt, he would say, I want you to spend more of your time on the Germans, and I want you to put your best man, your best resources on that target first, and then later you can switch to the other target. The Germans are thoroughly compromised. They use this thing called the enigma, and various organizations in the German government have different forms of enigma, but the British and the Americans have defeated most of them by the end of the war. So sometimes the Winston Churchill would be reading what Hitler was telling a senior theater commander before the theater commander read it. So there's some great successes in the Pacific, but it's a less mature theater. It takes longer for the systems to grow up and become functioning. So intelligence is a matter of bureaucracy, and I believe there can be good bureaucracies and bad bureaucracies or systems. It takes longer for the system to grow up in the Pacific than the Atlantic. No, it's fascinating to me as people point out that I mean the, you know, in an ironic way, I mean the Germans are responsible for the growth of our intelligence by starting the war too, and then the Russians seem to carry it on Cold War after the war is over. In August of 45, I mean the war here on the Pacific finally grinds to an end, and again there's a move afoot in Washington to dismember some of the intelligence community, especially the OSF. Can you talk about that? So it's a, yes, there's a, most of the major players during the war, and so you've got Hoover, Donovan, and then you've got the Code Breakers. Each one of these sets of men is looking at what's going to happen after the war. Everyone's sure that the Allies are going to win the war. There is almost nobody after Ambassador Joe Kennedy who says the Germans are going to win. And so everyone knows the Allies are going to win, and they're saying, I need a role in the peacetime establishment. So what happens in, so Roosevelt dies in April 45, Truman comes in, and the war is over in August, and when Japan surrenders, formalized early September 1945, and then all hell breaks loose in Washington as each one of these players makes his bid to take over American intelligence. And I, so there's a number of dynamics here, there's each one of them saying, I can do this, I can do this, let me do it. At the same time, there's all the people in uniform who's saying, hey, I've been here for, I've been in uniform for three, four years now, I need to go home. And so OSS, you know, as I said, it would hit a peak of about 13,000. The overwhelming majority of those are uniform military, and they want to go home. And Truman's going to let him go home. He almost has no choice, almost has no choice. If you were president and you said, no, we're going to keep everyone on for another six months, you might not have been president for long. So, but what he wants to do is put some order into the process and say, let's think about what we're doing and come up with the right solution. So one of, and he works with the Bureau of the Budget, which is a rough equivalent of OMB today. It's sort of the sort of the office that manages the executive branch. And they come up with a plan to, first of all, send Donovan home. Donovan has been a little too wild for everyone's taste by this time. And they say, Bill, it's better if you go back, back to New York and practice law, which was an athma to him by this point. Anyway, so, but they say, Bill, some of your ideas, we like your ideas. We like the ideas for a central intelligence agency, small, small letters. And we like the idea of centralizing functions under one umbrella. And so that is one of the themes that he, that's, that's what OSS gives us is the idea of central intelligence of an independent agency that works for the executive, not for another branch. Hoover, for instance, works for DOJ, right? State Department has a wonderful group known as INR these days, but they work for the Secretary of State. And Donovan's idea is America needs an intelligence organization that just works for the president, period, full stop, nothing in between the president and the agency. So that's what he leaves. And there's this, there's this, it's a food fight, basically, it's, it's, it's unseemly people shouted each other, people insult each other. And after a while, Truman sets in steps in and he says, we just got to just got to make a decision. And so he makes a mediocre decision and creates something called the, the National Intelligence Authority, which is kind of like a board of directors and the Central Intelligence Group, which is like a group of government employees, detailed from other agencies, right? It's not its own agency. It's like, you're going to take some from here, some from there, and they're going to temporarily work in this group. So that's what, where this all ends in 1946, January 1946. And then that starts the, starts the ball rolling towards the post war intelligence organization. Right now we have 18. 18. Yes, I see. And we have a heap of budgets in each. Yeah. But this, but this is, this is where it all starts. This is the, the acorn that's that sprouts the huge oak tree. Let me just, just ask you a couple brief questions. I mean, you've got some really fascinating personalities. Let's talk the pages of this book. Tell me who William Friedman was. William Friedman. So Friedman's one of my favorites. Friedman falls into the category, same category as Joe Roseford, in a way, he's a man who does great things in spite of the lack of support that he faces. Friedman is a, he's born in Russia. He's Jewish. He, he grows up in the United States. So, you know, he, he, and he's a, he's a whiz with, with numbers. And he gets involved in code breaking in World War One, actually a little bit before World War One. He's one of the founders. He's one of the guys. He, he, he writes manuals and gives lectures on how the field should be organized. And he kind of keeps things quietly together. When the black chamber is sent home by Stimson, he goes up to New York and personally supervises the retention of the files and brings them down to Washington and puts them in a vault. In the, in the munitions building the tempo on the National Mall. So he's, he's continuity. He's, he's the guy who builds the profession. He's the guy who figures out how to do. He hires brilliant code breakers. And he, he just, so, and he pays the price. He's a sensitive guy. He worries about things. He doesn't know how to externalize. He doesn't feel he can go home at night and tell his wife, who by the way is a code breaker in her own right, Elizabeth Friedman. He doesn't feel he can say, you know, we've really had a problem with this code and it's wearing me down because I can't figure it out or I've got a problem with the secretary. So he just internalizes everything and eventually he collapses. He just, after they break the Japanese code and in 4041, he just at work he collapses. So they take him to Walter Reed, but he won't tell anybody up there why he collapsed and he won't even hint at the kind of work he's doing. So they put him in a locked ward for three months and, and, you know, they don't really treat him. He just, he just gets a forced rest and then he comes back. So, but he's, he's one of the foundational figures of American intelligence, especially the code breaking branch. Amazing. Nobody's written a book about him. There's a book about his wife, but not about him. And seems to be a genuine, he's also a Shakespeare scholar, and he seems to be a genuinely nice guy. Some of the, some of the people who are in my book are not particularly nice. They're, they're not some, you wouldn't want them for personal friends. You, you know, even professional friends, you might not want to rely on them. But Friedman, Friedman's a guy that almost everyone likes. And when he retires sometime in the 50s, he's presented with a card, you know, a farewell card that's signed by 1300 employees of the code breaking establishment. Sounds like a really amazing unsung hero, somebody who without his looking ahead, we might have really been behind the eight ball. I mean, it was bad enough as it was. Who was a Genevieve Scrotchen by pronounced her last name. I think you, I think you, I used to get it wrong. I think it is grouching. So Genevieve fits in the same mold with, with those two actually with, with Friedman and Rocheford. Genevieve is a math whiz. And she's from Buffalo. She goes. She wants to become a civil servant. But the, the opportunities for women are really limited. She gets a job with the railroad pension board, something like that. And Friedman spots the test results. There's like a standardized test given to people entering federal service and she, her score is just off the charts. So he hires her to be a code breaker. She doesn't know what code breaking is. You know, he's basically saying, would you like to come do something different at, at the, you know, on the mall in, in the munitions building and she comes down and she joins the effort to break the Japanese code. She is the one who makes the initial break into a code that came to be known as purple. And they do this by basically by looking at groups of numbers all day. I mean, like it's like doing a really difficult crossword puzzle day after day after day. And eventually she spots a pattern and she said this relates to that. And she takes it to the others. And they get briefly excited. They're code breakers so they don't go completely wild. But Friedman said this is the greatest day in the history of American code breaking. They order a case of Coca Cola. Each one drinks a Coca Cola. And then they go back to work. Go back to work looking at the, the numbers and the, you know, trying to solve the puzzles. Wow. And lastly, I mean, a favorite of mine that you mentioned, Alfred T. McCormick. Oh, McCormick. So McCormick, you know, if I had to pick one guy who was totally underappreciated in the history of World War Two, it would be McCormick, who is again a Wall Street lawyer, you know, and he is not a friend of the New Deal. He's not, he's not crazy on the isolationist side either. But Roosevelt in the New Deal is not his way to go. He works for a firm called Kravath, Swain and Moore. And they, they're there serving the interests of a large corporations. And Stimson, so we go back to Stimson, Wall Street lawyer, Stimson's assistant, McCloy, another Wall Street lawyer. And after Pearl Harbor, Stimson McCloy are talking and they go, did we miss something? You know, were we not set up right to appreciate what we were getting from the code breaking effort? And McCloy says to Stimson, I got just a guy for you to do survey it and maybe put into, put a solution into effect. And so they bring McCormick down. And McCormick says, McCormick just drops what he's doing at the law firm and says, I'm out of here, guys. My country calls. You know, and he could have said, well, you know, I want this stock option or, you know, keep my desk, don't hire somebody else or, or put me on, you know, a lot of, a lot of people got paid by both the old and the new job. But he just says, I'm out of here, I'm going to do it. And he throws himself into the work. And he basically comes up with a system for evaluating the code breaking take. So I talked earlier about how Roosevelt might see on one day, a raw cable destined for the Japanese ambassador. And then the next day he might see another cable, but he would never see a product that sort of tie them together. And that's what McCormick does. He creates a product, creates a digest that puts all these things in context. So you see the beginning of a good analytic machine in American intelligence as thanks to thanks to him and he brings he brings like 100 lawyers from Wall Street down to Washington and puts him to work doing this. He says, these are the only people who are smart enough and have the work ethic to get it done. And boy, do they work hard. They get there at seven in the morning. They don't go home till their work's finished for that day, which could be eight or nine at night. McCormick gives them every 14th day off. Imagine. I cannot, especially in this environment. I suppose to I mean the training they had handling large complex litigation. I mean really was the key skill to bring to the table and setting up that that's that's McCormick's argument. He says no one else that he knows of is as skilled as immerse at immersing themselves in great amounts of data. And finding the patterns. So, you know, this, well, empty empty Wall Street out, populate the Pentagon with lawyers. Eventually, the Pentagon opens up 43 so they move from from the mall to the Pentagon. And it kind of, you know, you got to, I respect the guy. He unfortunately dies in his fifties. And I figure, I figure he's just worn out. I figure, you know, these, these 70 hour weeks, whether it's in Washington, or back on Wall Street. He is just working so hard. And I, I figure that wears him out. He leaves a 250, 250 acre estate in Connecticut. And he basically has a, a, a, a, a, an easement to preserve it for in its natural state. So, he's kind of a hero all around. Right now, another unsung hero who quiet efforts really made a difference and turn the tide. Just a couple more questions, Nick, before we wrap up, let's talk about your something that always interests me as a writer is your own writing routine. I mean, you get up at a certain time and do you work X number of hours like Hemingway and then have a drink? Well, so what do you do? For those, for the viewers who don't know my last book was on Hemingway and Hemingway had a Hemingway would get up early in the morning before the other people in the house. And he would work from, let's say five or six a.m. until around noon and then he'd have a drink and it is his work day and then you have another drink and his work day was over. So, I don't have, I'm reasonably disciplined, but I don't have a set routine. I'm pretty restless. I'll work. I'll work here. You're, you're now looking at my basement office in Washington area and work. Sometimes I work in a library. Sometimes I'll work in a coffee shop or a co-work space. Basically, I respond well to deadlines. You give me a deadline, I'll meet it. And, but I don't have a set, you know, the deadline will impose a little bit of a routine on me. I'm, you know, there's also the problem of having great, great amounts of data, sort of like the McCormick and his lawyers. And what do I do with that? I found a little bit of success in using the computer to make it accessible by keyword. So I take notes and, you know, and then if I want to go back like McCormick, so then I just go to one of my databases and type in McCormick and I'd get everything on McCormick. And then I might type in the dates. I'm also reasonably good at remembering where stuff comes from. Again, you asked me early on about National Archives. So important National Archives collections for this were the special research studies, special research histories, the SRH collection, which is mostly about code breaking, the OSS collection, which is virtually the entire set of files of an intelligence agency. You know, I mean, you think, you think how often does that happen? How often in history is there an intelligence agency, all of whose files are accessible, almost all? Very rare. Tell the audience about Donovan and his photographic book records. So Donovan at the end of the war, he really wants to, he wants to stay a player in the intelligence business. And he also wants to defend the history of OSS and perhaps write the history of OSS himself. And so in the last week in office, he copies, he uses a microfilm, early microfilm machine to copy thousands of documents and create these microfilms that he ships to his law office in New York. The National Archives surprise says, we want this stuff back. It's not yours, it's ours. Classified too, right? I mean, and it's classified. Yeah, yeah. And, and, and eventually it gets back to the archives and you can see the microfilms today. There is absolutely no question about what Donovan did this. And as one of the archivists noted in an article, his fingerprints and hand prints are on the film. So there's no, yeah, he can't, he can't say, oh, my assistant did that and I wasn't aware of it. So, but, but, you know, it, I think he knew it was irregular. Otherwise he wouldn't have done it at night. Right. Right. And, and, but on the other hand, in, in, in 1945, there was a, you know, things were a little looser. The, the, the environment was immature. So we, we didn't have a lot of regulations that say this belongs to the government. This belongs to the individual. You know, you will absolutely not carry this out or, or bring this in. An interesting anecdote that shows this is Frank Rowlett, one of Friedman's prime code breakers has no security clearances. And the reason he has no security clearances is he was hired before there were any. Right. And with Friedman, he's busy inventing the field. And then sometime in the middle of war, someone says, what are, what are Rowlett's clearances? And so they, they pull his file and go look, well, well, he doesn't have any. And so they play catch up all, but that gives you an idea of what I mean when I'm talking about a mature agency and an immature agency. In, in the, in World War Two, we're dealing with immature agencies who, who still managed to produce some amazing things. No way. And Dave, let me ask you this. Do you enjoy the researching more or the writing of the book? I think I enjoy research more. And it's, it's the research is a little bit like, like gambling. You, you know, every, every time you pull a lever on the, on the old slot machines, you think you might possibly hit the jackpot. So every time you go to the archives and you order a cart of documents, you think, okay, this is the time I'm going to get, I'm going to find the fill in the blank, you know, I'm going to find a good example be Hemingway's will. Let's say I'm going to find the overlooked, the last will that's always been overlooked. It's usually not that way. You usually find little pieces that you come home and you put together later on. But the short answer to your question is, I enjoy the research more because I'm always, you know, there's always that hope that that you'll strike the pot of gold. I like the writing too. And I've learned, I've learned a lot about writing since I started my Hemingway book. And I think I'm probably a better writer for it. But research for sure. The archives, going to the archives is exciting for us. Yeah, it's very exciting. It's a great institution. Last question. What was the biggest surprise that you found in writing this book? I mean, what didn't you know for you? And what do you know now that really surprised you? Well, they, so the this issue that I've been talking about the last few minutes, which is mature and immature organizations. And so that it's the idea that professionalism matters. So if you look at the code breakers before Pearl Harbor, they did great stuff, right? They broke the Japanese diplomatic code. And that was a code breaking triumph, but it wasn't a triumph of intelligence, because you couldn't really, you weren't putting it to its best use. And so it takes somebody like McCormick to come down and professionalize the process so that you get a consistently good, usable product. So I think that's kind of, that's my, that's probably my biggest surprise. Is the surprise the right word or insight? A couple others would be how bad a bad Roosevelt was as an Intel manager. And, and then at the end I hold a candle for for Truman for, you know, here's a guy who never went to college, graduate from high school, never went to college, learned on the job and does an amazing job of learning how to be president. You know, Roosevelt gives him almost no, you know, has few briefings. Roosevelt doesn't say when I talk to this guy, I, you know, then I write this memo or, you know, hear the people you need to rely on. Basically he keeps him isolated. His office is in the capital, not, not the executive office building. So he does such a, he does an amazing job of figuring out how to run the government and the war and eventually stand up American intelligence. Very well said. Well, Nicholas, thank you so much for joining us today. I mean, again, I think this is a book that will stand the test of time. I mean, it's a real contribution to not only intelligence history but also American history. I've always said that you really can't understand history of this country without understanding history of its intelligence services. So this is quite a, quite an accomplishment. It's a delight to read. Thank you. Again, it flows exceptionally well. The research is prodigious and, you know, as a connoisseur of this, I can't thank you enough for writing the book and joining us here today at the National Archives. Well, thank you. So take care and good luck. Thank you. Same to you.