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 entree 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.
General
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