Authors: Jennet Conant
*
A later investigation revealed that von Schelle was captured by the Germans as part of Operation Nordpol and reportedly was made an unwitting accomplice to their plan to penetrate a major SOE network in France. He survived the war and ultimately returned to Brazil. Bryce was never informed of the results of the SOE investigation and went to his grave still burdened by his part in his friend’s death.
*
Fleming’s first novel,
Casino Royale,
published in 1953, contains a highly exaggerated reference to the mission—in which James Bond shoots a Japanese cipher expert at Rockefeller Center—as the first of two dangerous assignments that earned Bond his double-0 classification.
*
After the death of her husband in 1960, she married Joe Alsop, fully aware that he was gay, and became a formidable Washington hostess in her own right.
*
Dahl related this amusing dinner anecdote, and the subsequent dish on Evalyn Walsh McLean, to Marsh, who had the verbal report typed up in memo form and passed it on to the vice president for his perusal, under the sardonic heading: “
SOCIAL NOTE
—
ATTENTION MRS. WALLACE
.”
*
Dahl’s verbatim observations, filed under “Comments of a week-end reporter—Hyde Park,” were transcribed and preserved for posterity by Marsh’s secretary.
*
It seems likely that Dahl, as one of the authors of the official history, wrote the section on Pearson himself, particularly as it contains many vivid passages that stand out from the rest of the report, and details a number of incidents that Dahl was personally involved in and that he later recounted in an interview with the CBC.
*
Although the matter was never publicly resolved, Marsh was right. In his memoir the
Chicago Tribune
reporter Walter Trohan revealed that Baruch was his source but had “stretched the story a bit.” Beaverbrook’s emeralds were in fact diamonds, in the form of antique clips, and the family heirlooms were worth several thousand dollars.
*
According to Johnson biographer Robert Caro, Alice continued to secretly see Johnson even after he became senator. Their relationship finally ended as a result of their bitter disagreement over the Vietnam War, which she passionately opposed.
*
In interviews after the war, Dahl always maintained that he was “kicked out of the embassy” and, thanks to Stephenson, returned as a wing commander. In recent years, however, this claim has been disputed. According to the biographer Jeremy Treglown, neither his RAF file nor the air force list had any record of the promotion. The RAF admits there has been some confusion about Dahl’s service record, but Alan Thomas of the Air Historical Branch at Northolt confirms Dahl was appointed wing commander in 1943. In any case, Dahl was not telling tall tales, as has sometimes been implied. As Dahl was often vague about exact dates, and the records are not clear, it is hard to tell if he received this “promotion” in the fall of 1943 or several months later, after a subsequent trip to England.
*
According to the intelligence historian Henry Hyde, the report was eventually picked up by General Eisenhower’s Psychological Warfare Board, which successfully implemented some of Ogilvy’s ideas in Europe during the last year of the war.
*
This was prescient, to say the least, considering that Dahl later reported to the BSC that Wallace himself was unaware of the decision for another five months, until almost the day of the dramatic events of the Democratic convention, when Roosevelt acted to remove Wallace from the ticket and replace him with Truman.
*
When Lambert died, Ogilvy inherited his clothes.
*
The story was first published in
The New Yorker
in 1953 and later collected in
Someone Like You.
*
Mary Welsh would become Hemingway’s fourth wife.
*
The letter makes reference to a running joke between them that they crudely called the “Joy Through Length Project.”
*
Unbeknownst to Dahl, Maclean was also a Soviet agent and a member of the Cambridge spy ring. He became head of the American department of the Foreign Office and passed on classified information about the development of the atomic bomb, before defecting to Moscow with Philby in 1951. Dahl later wrote a short story about Maclean entitled “The Vanishing Act.” It was never published.
*
It was later shown that Gallup was not guilty of tampering, and that the margin of error in his election forecasts was the result of a genuine miscalculation, or as Isaiah Berlin put it, “unavoidable human fallibility.”
*
Alice Glass was married a total of five times. After divorcing Marsh, she wed two of his friends, and frequent Longlea guests, in rapid succession: Palmer Weber and Zadel Skolovsky. After a brief fourth union, her fifth marriage, to Colonel Richard J. Kirkpatrick, lasted from 1959 to his death in 1974. Alice died of cancer in Marlin, Texas, in December 1976.
*
As with almost everything to do with Stephenson, the fate of the twenty volumes, if there were in fact twenty, is shrouded in mystery. Stephenson claimed he gave Roosevelt a copy, but as the president died long before the book was completed, and as there is no record of it at the Roosevelt Library, this does not seem likely. In 1946 he ordered Hill to destroy the ten copies collecting dust in the Montreal safe. What happened to the rest? Stephenson made a copy available to his handpicked biographer, Harford Montgomery Hyde, who had served under him at the BSC from 1941 to 1944 and quoted extensively from it for his book
The Quiet Canadian,
which was published in 1962. Stephenson similarly encouraged his subordinate Dick Ellis in his efforts to chronicle his tenure as head of the BSC, but later rejected his two-hundred-page draft. His subsequent biographer William Stevenson also obtained a copy of the BSC chief’s official history for his 1976 best seller
A Man Called Intrepid
. There followed what Thomas Troy, the American intelligence historian, called “a literary striptease,” with various journalists and authors, including himself, managing a peek at the bible, if only briefly. No one knows for certain how many of the original volumes exist, or where they are all located. Fifty-three years later, this “remarkable document,” as Nigel West calls it in his introduction, was finally made public by St. Ermin’s Press in Britain, which published it in its “complete and unexpurgated format.” This 1998 edition,
British Security Coordination: The Secret History of British Intelligence in the Americas, 1940–1945,
carries the following disclaimer: “This publication has not been officially endorsed by Her Majesty’s Government.”
*
Dahl was actually listed as 60 percent disabled and pensioned off for the paltry sum of 160 pounds.
*
It was thirty years before he attempted another novel with
My Uncle Oswald
. He would similarly renounce the theater after the disastrous Broadway debut of his first play,
The Honeys,
in 1955.
*
As Marsh’s philanthropy grew, the agents shrank in number and were phased out altogether in 1961 after the Internal Revenue Service raised questions about the practice. The Public Welfare Foundation continues to this day and, with assets of over $600 million, ranks as one of the nation’s 150 wealthiest private philanthropies, with annual grants of $21.4 million.