Customer Reviews

The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington

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When I ordered this book, I didn't really know what to expect. To be honest, I wasn't completely sure if it was a novel or non-fiction. I had always enjoyed WW2 historical fiction such as Herman Wouk's Winds of War and War and Rememberance so I thought this book would be similar.

This book is actually a historical account of the propaganda and espionage tactics used by the British to influence American public and political policy during WWII.

I'm no great WWII historian so I will be showing my ignorance here... but who knew that our own allies were engaged in covert activities directed at our own government. However, this book describes the activities of Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, and several other British "covert agents" who were in the US during WWII. The book, though non-fiction, reads like part-novel and part high-society gossip.

While it is common knowledge that the US was not pulled into WW2 until the bombing of Pearl Harbor by Japan, less known is how we became involved in the European theater. The US had tried to remain "neutral" and had adopted an isolationist stance when it came to the European wars. Because the US, at the time, generally treated Great Britain with a certain level of distrust (that whole "British Imperialism" thing), it took some work from the "inside" to sway the American Public Opinion and Leadership to actively engage in the European Theater.

What was particularly interesting to me (particularly in light of the current presidential campaign and the current debate associated with America's role on the world stage) was the debate between Republicans and FDR's "New Dealers" on how isolationist a stance America should adopt. In what is a reverse from present day politics, the Republicans were against a broader involvement in WW2 while the New Dealers were much more sympathetic to the European conflicts.

And while I had always heard of Ian Fleming as the creator of the James Bond series, it turns out that Ian Fleming's Bond character may have been based on more reality than we would think (minus the cool gadgets). In a sense, this book documents how the whole "James Bond 007" phenomenon got its start.

The reading style is an easy-to-read narrative style that strikes a balance between being readable and not overwhelming the reader with being too scholarly. Yet the author doesn't "talk down" to her readers either by being "sensationalist" or overly dramatic.

All in all, this book was a great read and the fact that it is true makes it even more interesting. I highly recommend!

We learn in the first third of THE IRREGULARS that self-aggrandizing professional hobnobber/gigolo Roald Dahl dallied with many an over-40 society dame in a quest for info potentially useful to his own government.

From this work we get the impression that much of D.C.'s elite were alcoholic braggarts, satyrs, over-aged nymphs and not-very-nice folks, in general who spent most of their time tearing each other down at endless, dreary cocktail parties. The average reader won't recognize any of these individuals or give a whit about them.

Later, Dahl fries bigger tuna: he ingratiates himself with first Eleanor and then Franklin Roosevelt, spending weekends with them at Hyde Park and gathering tidbits to feed to Winnie Churchill via his own superiors. But it was a strange game: FDR knew what Dahl was about and anything this fellow could learn was surely OK with the President, who undoubtedly used an opportunistic back door channel to clandestinely communicate with his British counterpart.

After slogging through a good 100 pages of obscure Washingtonians, a befuddling list almost as large as that of Tolstoy's characters in WAR AND PEACE, and not finding any of them worth remembering, then watching Dahl gleefully reporting his FDR-approved nuggets to the British equivalent of the OSS, your reviewer set this tome down, then found it impossible to pick up again.

Your disappointed history buff shouldn't have been surprised that "The Irregulars" was such a stone drag, however. When all that a snoop (OK...'operative') risks in clandestinely monitoring an ally is a party hangover or the Clap, one's attention tends to falter. Far more riveting would be the true story of a spy within the Reich itself; someone, who if caught would not see the sun rise tomorrow.

"Don't you think that you or some other regular officer should be doing this job?"

"We've all got our hands full," the Captain said.

Roald Dahl had it all; a wounded RAF pilot who had the intellect, grace and charm to open doors that would typically be shut to even the biggest political insiders.

And as author Jennet Conant writes in this biography of Dahl, the friends he had in high places ultimately shaped the policies of the United States in World War II and in the opening salvos of the Cold War, but with a gentle push or - oftentimes - a hard shove into a specific direction by British agents.

Dahl was a key player in a British spy ring in Washington, D.C., which found him striding confidently into the White House halls of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration and counting on such key players as FDR, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry Wallace and Henry Morgentheau, Jr., as vital colleagues.

Starting in 1942, Dahl became entwined in a wide web of intrigue designed by Sir William "Intrepid" Stevenson to destroy brick-by-brick the isolationist movement in the U.S. and shape the political relations between the two nations in the war against Nazi Germany. Some of Dahl's work was done with the approval of FDR.

Important areas of this campaign included the use of influential journalists - Walter Winchell, Drew Pearson - and other media members to tell the story of cooperation and a plot against U.S. corporations that retained cozy relations with the Nazis.

The canvas of the post-war landscape included Dahl's 1946 proposal of an American-English Secret Service, writes Conant. But as a new type of war with the Soviet Union turned frigid, there was personal turmoil for spies like Dahl who came in from the cold. But old friendships ultimately did not fade away after the covert warriors slowly disappeared from the scene.

"I have endeavored to pull the curtain back on one small part of this shadowy episode in order to tell the story of young Dahl's incredible experience as one of Stepenson's 'agents of influence' in America," writes Conant.

Mission accomplished.

The Good for me was in learning about Dahl's mentor/guru, the Texas millionaire Charles Marsh who moved to Wash. D. C. from here in Austin, Tx. where he published our daily newspaper and fell in lust with "a nude goddess" emerging from his swimming pool. Marsh's connections with a young and playful Lyndon Johnson also allowed Ms. Conant to titillate readers with stories of LBJ's amorous adventures around Washington; his own and many others. It was fun to find Mr. Marsh's former Austin residence here and shoot a foto for the fridge of where an historic millionaire once lived. The classy old house is nice without being "Austintatious." Another Good thing came in learning about RAF fighter pilot Dahl's WW II books which I've now ordered and look forward to reading. "The Irregulars" other Good qualities are many and diverse but you gotta dig constantly because they are buried within a dense compilation of faces, places, parties and poopers which can entertain and numb, sometimes simultaneously.

The Bad was in trying to keep straight the hundreds of persons we not only meet but learn more about than was necessary as Ms. Conant apparently had little self control or say in weeding out those folks not truly relevant to the story. This long list leads to many digressions as the book takes on the feel of a society/gossip column rather than an actual history. Occasionally we are led astray following her accounts of the lives and loves of people and times far removed from Roald Dahl's wartime efforts on behalf of King and country. A few are more interesting than others but only some are truly involved in the book's innately broad scope. More isn't better this time. Considering the book's topic and inclusion of too many nonessential characters, there is one singular sin of omission in Ms. Conant's failure to mention a very important 1941 book by the one and only Ernie Pyle. Titled simply "Ernie Pyle In England" it was exactly the type book that Dahl and his cohorts worked hard and surepticiously to get published in America because of its subject. E. P. was already a well established newspaperman whose folksy columns reached millions of Americans so his adventures in England at the peak of the Luftwaffe's blitz on london was precisely what Dahl's covert intel agency wanted Americans to read about just then. "The Irregulars" is mainly about the tug of war between American isolationists versus the FDR administration's efforts to help England as much as current law would allow. For that to succeed, pro-British public opinion and sympathy was much needed and Ernie's fine little tome delivered that in spades. So leaving Ernie Pyle out of her book while including so many others whose names we never needed to know is odd at best and unforgivable at worst.

The Ugly has been mentioned in numerous reviews here but more must be said about the lack of competent copy-editing in "The Irregulars"; only the best is expected from so major a publisher as Simon & Schuster. What makes this a bit ironic is that Ms. Conant singles out her copy-editor for praise by name. So reading the Acknowledgments we now know exactly who at S & S dropped the ball in spite of the author's claim of "painstaking copyediting" which suggests that Ms. Conant has apparently not read the finished product. Another reviewer states that the book is full of factoids and that is undeniable but how many of them are factual is another story. An obvious example is Ms. Conant's statement that Canadian bred arch-mogul/spy master Bill Stephenson began Sound City, and also somehow Britain's famous "Sheparton Studio"; this just ain't so and, btw, it's spelled Shepperton. This sort of sloppy work and poor fact checking is compounded when a major player's name changes in the text; was it Robert Ingersoll or Ralph Ingersoll who went on to join Gen. Omar Bradley's staff in Europe. As the author of five books I certainly make no claims of perfection but will say that we can get a lot closer than does "The Irregulars" to the age old craft of book publishing. The diminished result is simply off-putting and in the long run should make many readers doubt the overall veracity and worth of the story itself. Mr. Dahl deserves better and so do we, which according to one reviewer is available in other titles by Jennet Conant.

"The Irregulars," comes to us as a thoroughly, even exhaustively researched glimpse at a critical moment in British, and American, history. It's authored by Jennet Conant, journalist who has written profiles for "Vanity Fair," "Esquire," "GQ,""Newsweek," and "The New York Times," and author of the bestselling Tuxedo Park : A Wall Street Tycoon and the Secret Palace of Science That Changed the Course of World War II; and 109 East Palace: Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos. She tackles the fraught years prior to America's entry into World War II, when the British were forced to fight the German Third Reich on their own; the intense war years that followed; and the no less intense immediate postwar years of the two countries.

Conant does this by focusing on Washington, D.C. during the years when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was U.S. President, and Winston Churchill was British Prime Minister. She also noticeably focuses on celebrated British author Roald Dahl; not that he's not worthy of attention, of course, but it's not clear that he should be the centerpiece of this book. It may be that she simply had access to a cache of his previously unseen materials.

During the prewar period, the British, standing alone against the Nazi war machine, desperately needed American help, and so, with FDR's tacit permission, came up with a desperate scheme, putting in place a ring of British spies in America. Under the leadership of that famed millionaire newspaper publisher Canadian, Sir William Stephenson, AKA Intrepid, they were charged with mounting a secret campaign of propaganda and political subversion to weaken America's isolationists, bring the country into the war against Germany, and influence U.S. policy in favor of the U.K. They were officially the British Security Coordination (BSC) although the troops preferred to call themselves the Baker Street Irregulars, after Sherlock Holmes amateur helpers, and they were amateurs, with no spying experience, picked for their looks, their charm, their cleverness and their wit. They planted British propaganda in American newspapers and radio programs, in aid of which they secretly influenced leading journalists, including Drew Pearson, Walter Winchell, and Walter Lipmann. They harassed prominent isolationist America Firsters and anti-New Dealers, and American corporations that did business with Nazi Germany.

They continued their work during the war, helping to found and construct/instruct their American counterpart, the Office of Secret Services (OSS), under the leadership of another famed master spy, (Wild) Bill Donovan, an amiable Irishman who himself employed a significant number of Brits. And, as the war came to a close, they occupied themselves with the postwar world, particularly the allocation of air routes, fighting for their country's economic well-being against the shrewd and greedy Juan Trippe, of Pan American Airlines.

Many well-born young Britishers were involved in this effort, and several would go on to fame and fortune. Among them were Ivar Bryce, whom Conant describes as "Tall, dark and handsome to the point of absurdity, he looked like an Aztec prince and was often mistaken for a film star. He was born to European nobility, counted the Marquess of Milford-Haven and the Earl of Medina as nephews, and radiated the languid ennui of someone who never had to work for a living." She quotes Lord Mountbatten on his distant nephew, "It's terrible, the advantages he's had to overcome."

Bryce was an old school chum of the Scotsman, Ian Fleming, who was also playing the game for all he was worth. Fleming would go on, of course, to create the world's most famous and popular fictional spy, James Bond, No. 007. And, according to Conant, this typically thrifty Scot, in creating his works, never wasted a scrap of his wartime experience, nor a bit of a co-workers name. Also enjoying the fun was another Scotsman, David Ogilvy. Actress/writer Ruth Gordon described him, on his arrival, as "the tall young man with the flaming red hair." Rosser Reeves declared, "In those days David looked just like Lord Byron." Ogilvy would go on, during the postwar years, to found Ogilvy and Mather, and become the world's most famous advertising man. Well-known, witty, and gay British playwright Noel Coward was also active. Well, it's quite obvious; Mother Country wasn't picking these particular spies for their ability to blend into walls.

The young Roald Dahl never could have blended into the walls, either. He was tall too, 6'4", with striking blue eyes, dashing, handsome, witty and charming. And he came trailing uniformed romance, as an injured Royal Air Force pilot. He began his American experience by being appointed to the British Embassy in Washington, but he didn't fit in particularly well there, and eventually moved to the covert side. Dahl was undoubtedly a patriot, though the odd thing is, as Conant reveals, that, although he was British born and bred, he was 100% ethnic Norwegian. His parents were both full-blooded Norwegians who had settled in the U.K.; Norwegian was spoken in the home, and vacations were taken in their far northern homeland. Dahl's Norwegian was as good as his English. Never mind: his beat was Washington, and he turned the city inside out. He conquered First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband Franklin, the President; wartime leaders from Henry Wallace to Henry Morgenthau, the heights of Washington Society, from salon society heiresses Evalyn Walsh Maclean to Alicia (Cissy) Paterson, publisher of the Washington Post. And then there were the women, troops of them, too, from strikingly beautiful Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers to glamorous freshman Congresswoman Clare Booth Luce, who was in the boring tenth year of her marriage to powerful Time Life publisher Henry Luce at the time. Dahl, who was reputed to be extremely well-endowed, can be said to have shagged for his country. Of his relationship with Mrs. Luce, Dahl once claimed he'd been required to perform sexually on every piece of furniture in her house. Dahl began writing of his piloting exploits during the war, and continued to write for his living, becoming best-known for his children's books "James and the Giant Peach," and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."(By the way, Dahl family prominence continues to the current day, with his granddaughter Sophie Dahl, descended from his first wife, actress Patricia Neal, as a well-known supermodel, serial dater of famous men, and now author of a well-received children's' book.)

Conant writes well, and keeps many balls spinning. She is just a little repetitive, occasionally confusing, if you can't read the book at a sitting, and who can. It gets a little tough remembering which of her handsome, hard-working British lads labored where. But, evidently, "The Irregulars" is a gossip lover's dream, particularly a political junkie's dream; and great for those who just can't get enough World War II, or spy material, particularly of the British variety, so you can count me in.

I'm glad I got this book out of the library instead of spending money on it.

It abounded in typos and misspellings, and I gave up in disgust about halfway through. One example: In a book about Washington, you'd think the author/editors could at least spell Capitol Hill (the book had Capital Hill!).

I found this book to be somewhat tedious. Roald Dahl seems to go from one "affair" to another. Both Churchill and FDR seem to be trying to use him for their own ends. He seems to have found a way to "do his patriotic duty" by flipping from one bed or party to the next. Heck of a way to spend the war.

I never found myself sufficiently engaged to "like" the title character. (I've read other books about really rotten people who, I'm ashamed to say but credit the author, I somewhat "liked" by the end of the book. This is not one of those books.) After the first hundred pages, I really had to force myself to continue.

There is some good background information. If the reader had never been exposed to the "chess game" Winnie and FDR were playing with each other, he'd learn something of it here. I already knew that LBJ was a womanizing scoundrel, but it was nice to see it confirmed.

If you enjoy gossip columns, I suppose you'll like this. I don't/didn't.

Although I enjoyed the subject and was interested in the story, I finally put the book down after one too many typos. (I think it was "capitol" where it should have been "capital" that pushed me over the edge.) For a well-packaged book from a mainstream publisher and a recognized author, I was appalled by the number of missed words and incomplete sentences. More time was needed on the editing of this one.

When I ordered this book I wasn't quite sure what I was getting in to. Let it suffice to say that I am extremely happy that I ordered this book.

During the early 1940's, while Britain was getting pummeled both at home and all around the world, there were isolationists in the US who wanted nothing to do with what was going on with Great Britain or the European theater at large- they felt it had nothing to do with us. So with the 'tacit' approval of FDR, Britain was allowed to discreetly operate spy rings in the US that would allow the embedding of British non isolationist views of why the US should be in the war with Great Britain against Germany in movies, newspapers, magazines and they had so many other activities as well, even ones that would ultimately include involvement in our politics.

Enter Roald Dahl, the main character of the book ,a wounded RAF pilot who could no longer serve in the capacity of being a pilot. First he was given a post at the British Embassy as an air attache where he starting becoming a man around town and then he heard about a very serious covert British group operating within the US under Intrepid, or William Stephenson. It was called the BSC and Roald started working with them as a spy (one of the Baker Street Irregulars). It is almost hilarious how Roald Dahl started becoming everywhere (seemingly all at once) and how he seemed to have no boundaries at all in Washington society. Some of the antics he pulled off with some off the other Baker Street Irregulars are indeed interesting and humorous. One of the other Baker Street Irregulars was none other than Ian Fleming of James Bond fame.

On a larger scale, this book taught me a lot about history that I didn't know about- that even the friendliest of countries spy on each other to get their needs met and I would imagine it is still the same way today. I just felt gobsmacked when I read in the book that Britain was spying on us and manipulating us in WWII, however, they knew they could not win the war without us and history now shows us exactly what we all were up against- not just Europe or Great Britain, but what we were all up against. Perhaps that is why these British groups had FDR's tacit approval to try to move the US into being a less isolationist society.

In conclusion, this is a lovely work of non fiction and I highly recommend it to anyone. I loved this book.

For a story about a dashing young RAF pilot turned spy, you would expect some excitement, but there isn't much here. Mostly this is because the overall subject matter is not that interesting. This isn't cloak and dagger stuff. It's politics and influence. So there's lots of paper pushing, creating rumors, and trading information among high society types. What intrigue does come up is really quite tame. After a promising start, I had to force my way through the rest of the book.