# Adele Kibre

Adele Kibre (1898-1997) was an American medieval scholar who became a spy for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. Trained in Latin and with a PhD in medieval studies, she lived in Europe most of her adult life, supporting herself by filming academic and archived documents before and after the conflict, using her expertise in microphotography.

## Early life and education

Adele Kibre was born in Philadelphia in 1898, but her parents moved to California, so she grew up in Los Angeles. Her family was involved in Hollywood life. Her parents designed sets and one sister was married to a silent film star. Her sister Pearl Kibre was also a well-known academic in medieval studies. Adele studied at the University of California, Berkeley and taught Latin there after receiving her master's degree. She later earned a PhD at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation was a study of the text of the Carolingian scholar Smaragdus of Saint-Mihiel's Liber in partibus Donati, and was incorporated, after her death, into a critical edition by Bengt Löfstedt.

## Documentation research

Kibre obtained a postdoctoral fellowship to the American Academy of Rome after completing her PhD. She lived for most of the 1930s in Europe, supporting herself by doing research for American academics by photographing materials in European libraries. It was at these European libraries that she was exposed to microfilm technology.
In 1939 she met microfilm entrepreneur Eugene Power and acted as his interpreter at the Vatican library. Power recommended her to work freelance with the Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications (IDC), a United States agency which had an office in Stockholm. The role of the agency was to obtain and transmit mostly public documents originating in Europe, in particular from those areas under Axis control. Through this agency Kibre is attributed with sending 182 reels of microfilm to the British Ministry of Information. She also continued to make copies and photograph materials for US faculty and for her own studies, and in 1941 is reported to have journeyed from Europe to the United States with 17 pieces of luggage containing research materials. Kibre was also a very effective agent in the OSS acquisition program because of her producing over 3,000 reels of microfilm and giving so many books to London and Washington.
In August 1942, Kibre arrived in Stockholm and moved into the Grand Hotel in that capital city. Sweden officially was a neutral county, but many government officials sympathized with Germany, and the King often expressed dislike of soviet Russia. Kibre listed her work address as the American Legation (embassy), where she was an attaché. She described herself as a book-finder for the Library of Congress and as a press-reader (collecting newspapers and more scientific publications for transfer home in diplomatic pouches). Actually she had begun work as an overseas agent for the Interdepartmental Committee for the Acquisition of Foreign Publications, a branch of the OSS, the wartime predecessor to the CIA, which sought to acquire documents in Europe that the Allies could use to develop intelligence and plan covert operations. Kibre bought materials from news stands, bookshops and antique dealers, and also visited many libraries (including the Karolinska Institute) and microfilmed archive material for transfer to the United States.

## Later life, death and legacy

After the war, Kibre, who never married, became a freelance archival photographer. "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." Some of her letters from Europe are in the U.S. National Archives.

## Publications

* Prolegomena to the unpublished text of Smaragdus' commentary on Donatus, De partibus orationis. Thesis, University of Chicago, 1930
* "Microphotography in European libraries." Journal of Documentary Reproduction 4, no. 3 (1941): 158–163.