In His Majesty's Secret Service

The relationship between archaeology and espionage is close. During the twentieth century, for example, both Britain and the United States recruited archaeologists working in some of the world’s most sensitive locales as spies. Beginning in 1911, T. E. Lawrence excavated the Hittite site of Carchemish on the Euphrates River, from where he could keep an eye on the Germans, who were constructing a railway supply line between Baghdad and Berlin. During World War I, the renowned scholar of the ancient Near East Gertrude Bell often worked alongside Lawrence in the Arab Bureau of British intelligence in Cairo. Mesoamerican archaeologist Sylvanus Morley was Agent No. 53 of the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence during World War I in Central America and Mexico. Archaeologist Jack Caskey, head of the classics department at the University of Cincinnati and director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, was employed by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA. And the world’s most famous fictional archaeologist was also a spy. Indiana Jones worked for the OSS during World War II, hunting down artifacts before the Nazis could get their hands on them.