John Lisle

I forget which one it was.

So I get them to send me a photocopy of every single page, and it turns out that had the two missing pages.

So it's like, oh, my gosh, now I can actually use that information.

But they didn't have the two pages out of 1,000 that I actually needed.

They were missing.

So there are like 1,000 stories about these crazy coincidences that happen.

One of them, again, from my first book, was –

About Stanley Lovell, he's this chemist in the OSS creating all these ingenious gadgets and whatever.

He talks in his memoir about his wartime experience about being on this biological warfare committee where they were discussing the possibility of using anthrax and tularemia and tuberculosis and distributing this across towns and just discussing what would happen, what would we need to be able to do this, what would have to happen for us to engage in biological warfare.

But he talks about this in his memoir.

But I had never seen, you know, a copy of that meeting minutes of that meeting or anything.

He said that this this group, this biological warfare committee, it was part of the National Academy of Sciences.

And I thought, OK, well, that's interesting.

But, you know, I can't hardly put it in the book if I don't actually have the minutes in the meeting where they're talking about this.

Because Stanley Lovell was known to exaggerate, to say the least, some of the stuff that he was up to during the war.

But then I thought to myself, I kind of remember several years earlier when I was writing my dissertation before this book, I had gone to the National Academy of Sciences because I was working on some scientists in government.

And I ended up taking just a bunch of pictures of a lot of the materials they had in their archives.

And I went back through the material that I already had.

And it turns out I had taken pictures of the minutes of the very meeting Stanley Lovell was talking about in his memoir.

It was already in my possession.