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Roald Dahl And The British Spy Ring In Wartime Washington
Simon & Schuster
September 2008
On Sale: September 9, 2008
Featuring: Roald Dahl
416 pages
ISBN: 0743294580
EAN: 9780743294584
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
When Roald Dahl, a dashing young wounded RAF pilot, took up
his post at the British Embassy in Washington in 1942, his
assignment was to use his good looks, wit, and considerable
charm to gain access to the most powerful figures in
American political life. A patriot eager to do his part to
save his country from a Nazi invasion, he invaded the upper
reaches of the U.S. government and Georgetown society,
winning over First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband,
Franklin; befriending wartime leaders from Henry Wallace to
Henry Morgenthau; and seducing the glamorous freshman
congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce. Dahl would soon be
caught up in a complex web of deception masterminded by
William Stephenson, aka Intrepid, Churchill's legendary spy
chief, who, with President Roosevelt's tacit permission,
mounted a secret campaign of propaganda and political
subversion to weaken American isolationist forces, bring the
country into the war against Germany, and influence U.S.
policy in favor of England. Known as the British Security
Coordination (BSC) -- though the initiated preferred to
think of themselves as the Baker Street Irregulars in honor
of the amateurs who aided Sherlock Holmes -- these audacious
agents planted British propaganda in American newspapers and
radio programs, covertly influenced leading journalists --
including Drew Pearson, Walter Winchell, and Walter Lippmann
-- harassed prominent isolationists and anti-New Dealers,
and plotted against American corporations that did business
with the Third Reich. In an account better than spy
fiction, Jennet Conant shows Dahl progressing from reluctant
diplomat to sly man-about-town, parlaying his
morale-boosting wartime propaganda work into a successful
career as an author, which leads to his entrée into the
Roosevelt White House and Hyde Park and initiation into
British intelligence's elite dirty tricks squad, all in less
than three years. He and his colorful coconspirators --
David Ogilvy, Ian Fleming, and Ivar Bryce, recruited more
for their imagination and dramatic flair than any experience
in the spy business -- gossiped, bugged, and often
hilariously bungled their way across Washington, doing their
best to carry out their cloak-and-dagger assignments,
support the fledgling American intelligence agency (the
OSS), and see that Roosevelt was elected to an unprecedented
fourth term. It is an extraordinary tale of deceit,
double-dealing, and moral ambiguity -- all in the name of
victory. Richly detailed and meticulously researched,
Conant's compelling narrative draws on never-before-seen
wartime letters, diaries, and interviews and provides a
rare, and remarkably candid, insider's view of the
counterintelligence game during the tumultuous days of World
War II.
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