Authors: Jennet Conant
By the end of 1942, Dahl had become an integral part of Marsh’s large, eccentric R Street household. “We all just adored him, especially my father,” recalled Antoinette Marsh Haskell, who at twenty-eight was the oldest of the Marsh offspring. Along with her husband, Robert Haskell, and two brothers, Charles Jr. and John, Antoinette tried to make the lonely serviceman feel at home and invited him on weekend outings, to parties and holiday dinners. “We sort of adopted him,” said Antoinette. “Roald was a real charmer when he wanted to be. He was great fun to be around. He was always doing tricks and playing crazy practical jokes, probably to cut the tension, because it was a very tense time in the world.”
For Dahl, who missed his mother and sisters, the Marshes became a second family. The R Street house was his refuge. It was a place of comfort and fellowship, particularly that somber Christmas of 1942—the second since Pearl Harbor—when Dahl could have easily become engulfed in the melancholy that hung over the capital’s crowded boardinghouses and the hordes of displaced servicemen and war workers. Instead, he was invited to share the Marshes’ holiday feast and to admire the giant evergreen that Charles had managed to obtain despite the reported shortages caused by the lack of manpower and transportation. The tree was every bit as colossal and fabulous as its owner, and its glittering lights cheered all those in its presence, a gaudy beacon of hope amid all the uncertainty.
Fatherless from a young age, Dahl admired Charles Marsh more than any man he had ever met, and he became increasingly dependent on his advice and good opinion. Marsh was warm and generous, with an irrepressible confidence in himself and the future that exasperated his enemies and won him enduring friendships throughout his life. He was famously impulsive and dished out expensive gifts and treats for faithful colleagues without waiting for a reason or occasion. Once, when a guest admired a painting, he promptly took it off the wall and insisted she keep it as a gift. Having given himself permission to enjoy an unchecked existence, both materially and emotionally, he encouraged his young protégé to follow his example. He was an enthusiastic proponent of plunging into life with both feet, committing oneself fully, damn the consequences. He championed a sort of super-American, Whitmanesque belief in pure spirit, boundless possibility, and what he called that unshakable “bit of divine moving from the embryo to death in each of us.”
It was to Marsh that Dahl increasingly turned when he wanted to escape the petty demands of embassy life, and the petty officials who were always wringing their hands over his latest remark or ill-advised stunt. Never one to follow the rules, be it at school or at the embassy, Dahl was always getting up to some kind of mischief, whether it was filching expensive cigars from his boss’s office and passing them around, or sending self-aggrandizing missives to Marsh written on the thick, buff-colored British Embassy stationery and carrying the official red wax seal. His favorite pastime was lampooning the mannered style of his country’s wartime representatives, particularly that of the British ambassador, the first Earl of Halifax, an old Etonian who even his erudite information officer, Isaiah Berlin, an Oxford philosopher, described as “being not of this century.”
There was something about this remote, ascetic-looking man, with his withered left arm and disdainful air, that brought out the devil in Dahl. The embassy, like most British expatriate institutions, resembled nothing so much as a proper British public school and no doubt evoked unpleasant memories of the many years he had spent in those institutions and the succession of headmasters who had condoned unconscionable beatings of their young charges in the name of discipline. Dahl was not alone in feeling like he was back in school. Isaiah Berlin, who after Pearl Harbor had been seconded from the Ministry of Information to the embassy in Washington, compared the ambassador to a kind of Provost, “very grand, very vice-regal,” who looked down on the junior embassy officials, to say nothing of young attachés from the various missions.
It was common knowledge that Halifax, formerly foreign secretary, had expected that he and not Churchill would succeed Neville Chamberlain as prime minister and that Churchill had sent him to America to get him out of the way. It was equally well known that as one of Chamberlain’s key advisers, Halifax had advocated the doomed policy of appeasement toward the Germans and never lifted a finger to bolster Britain’s defenses despite the growing threat. Moreover, Halifax was proving a liability with the Americans, who found the former viceroy of India to be the embodiment of every abominable cliché about the British aristocracy and compared him unfavorably to his predecessor, Lord Lothian, whose death in December 1940 was considered a great loss by both countries.
*
Only three months after assuming his post, Halifax, true to form, had managed to commit a huge diplomatic blunder by going fox hunting in the green pastures of Pennsylvania. The sight of the new British ambassador riding to the hounds with American landed gentry prompted the poet Carl Sandburg to savage him in
The Nation
, ridiculing any official representative who would go cavorting around the countryside, indulging in “conspicuous leisure,” while his countrymen “were fighting a desperate war with an incalculable adversary.” He noted that photographs of His Lordship on horseback did nothing for the war effort and only inspired American workingmen to ask, “Are we going to war again for the sake of a lot of English fox-hunters?” Halifax continued to come in for steady criticism from the press, and even Churchill, on his visits to Washington, had taken to excluding him from his conferences with Roosevelt.
Dahl considered Halifax a pompous fool, completely dull and devoid of humor, and took every opportunity to ridicule his obsession with blood, class, and title. Like a goodly portion of the embassy staff, the British ambassador seemed to live in the past and soldiered on in the vague hope that the future would be much the same. A wicked mimic, Dahl could not resist mocking him. He took to imitating Halifax’s old-empire style, embellishing his letters with the ambassador’s obsequious phrases and endowing all his American friends with exalted titles. Marsh readily joined in the fun and sent his droll replies by return mail to Dahl’s embassy office, which was not without risk. His note thanking Dahl for a box of cigars, courtesy of the diplomatic bag from Havana, was addressed, “For Transmission to the King”:
Your most impressive gift will be consumed in the usual way. It is only human that I add that the element of snobbery which is present in all of us will be exhaled with every puff.
You will pardon my Anglophobia.
One cigar per Sunday will be my prayer and ritual to the Union Jack.
Marsh signed the letter, “Your Obedient Servant, Charles the Bald,” and included a lewd postscript: “You, of course, were courteous to the queen [Alice], but haven’t you found out over there that there are many better places to take one’s trousers off than the marital bed?”
Even though Dahl took the game too far, at times openly flaunting authority, his confidence and air of infallibility made him seem unassailable. “Roald could be like sand in an oyster,” recalled Dahl’s first wife, the actress Patricia Neal. “He seemed to feel he had the right to be awful and no one should dare counter him. Few did.”
As Antoinette observed, “In a game of one-upmanship, it was hard to top Roald. He got away with a lot. He was always sarcastic, but sometimes he was very rude, and he could be cruel, and that got him into trouble.”
Whether officials at the embassy eventually tripped to his prank correspondence or simply tired of his antics, Dahl came in for disciplinary action and was warned that he could be shipped back to England at a moment’s notice. Aware that he was under review and that his dismissal was most likely inevitable, Dahl decided he had better take preemptive action. He began checking his options and investigating other avenues of employment. “I started nosing around a little bit,” he recalled. “There were all sorts of things going on in Washington.” So many British information services and press agencies had set up shop in the United States, and there were so many different bureaus, departments, and divisions—most of them a complete waste of time and energy had they not been some sort of front organizations—that there was no shortage of opportunities. Add to that the confusion of fledgling intelligence organizations, including the British-American cooperative effort recently christened the OSS, which everyone in Washington jokingly called “Oh So Secret” or “Oh So Silly.” Something was bound to turn up.
“It was a very strange, chaotic time,” said the writer Peter Viertel, a marine officer assigned to the OSS, who met Dahl in Washington while receiving some additional training before being sent to France to infiltrate German lines. “You couldn’t tell what anyone was really doing, or who they were really working for. There were all these government agencies which had been formed, with all these different branches, full of people who were theoretically doing something for the war. You got the feeling a lot of those people were quite happy to be in those jobs, where there wasn’t a lot of trouble.”
It was at this unsettled moment in his life that Dahl first fastened on the idea of trying something outside normal channels. He had heard rumors about a sort of unofficial branch of the services that might be willing to take on someone like him. It was an organization that fell under the umbrella of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS, also known as MI6). No official title had been given to this cloak-and-dagger outfit, and for that matter no prior War Cabinet approval. It was called BSC by default, after the original Baker Street address of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) in London, but the initiated preferred to think of it as a reference to Sherlock Holmes’s “Baker Street Irregulars.” It had been formalized as the British Security Coordination, a title created arbitrarily by the American FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who was not raised on Arthur Conan Doyle and did not share the English enthusiasm for code names. The BSC’s American headquarters were in Rockefeller Center in New York, and the shadowy figure who ran it was a wealthy Canadian industrialist turned professional saboteur by the name of William Stephenson, who had the title of director of British Security Coordination and was head of the Secret Intelligence Service in the Western Hemisphere. Those in the know sometimes referred to him as
INTREPID
, after the BSC’s Manhattan cable address.
*
“I knew who he was,” recalled Dahl. “Not when I first arrived in Washington, but I very soon realized that everybody in any position of power either from the British ambassador down or on the American side knew about this extraordinary fellow.”
Stephenson had been dispatched to America by Churchill after the nightmarish winter of 1940, during which Mussolini joined forces with Hitler, German bombs rained down on Britain’s cities, and the enemy waited only twenty miles from their shores. As morale in Britain plummeted to its lowest point, Churchill concluded that England’s only chance of survival depended on the United States’ entry into the war. England had to find a way to contrive that intervention—whatever it took. America’s continued isolationism would be the death of them. If the United States was to be persuaded of the utmost importance of the British cause and pushed into action, then the isolationists—the antiwar lobby, Lindbergh’s America Firsters, and the Nazi-run fifth columnists—would have to be systematically undermined and eliminated. British intelligence would need a sophisticated network of agents on the ground to orchestrate the interventionist effort, and to supply propaganda that would promote fears of a direct German threat to the United States and prod the reluctant American people into supporting the war.
Dahl knew almost nothing of Stephenson or his covert operation, only that intelligence work promised another chance to serve his country and rout the enemy, and his unquestioning readiness to do so was underscored by his recent disappointing stint as a diplomat. Although the BSC’s charter was ostensibly concerned with the protection of British shipping and its vital cargoes, he would have guessed that it extended far beyond that—to include everything from small-scale sabotage and political subversion to all manner of devious activities that His Majesty’s Government would prefer not to acknowledge. The British propaganda machine, in the form of the Ministry of Information, confined itself to “white,” or straight, propaganda permitted in neutral or friendly countries. The BSC specialized in “black,” or secret propaganda—in other words, the kind of work you did not want to get caught doing. However dodgy it sounded, if it meant that he could stay in America and make some contribution to the war effort, he wanted in. After making some discreet inquiries, Dahl quietly let it be known that he was interested in being reassigned to the intelligence service.
Before long he received word through an intermediary that his name was not unknown to them and that certain people might be interested in any information he could pass their way. “I had been contacted by one of Bill’s [Stephenson] many chaps he had floating around, rather like wisps,” recalled Dahl. “You never really realized they were working for him, you thought they were working for someone else, and doing another perfectly different job.” While there is no record of precisely what Dahl was told, Bickham Sweet-Escott, another fresh-faced young Englishman who had been recruited by the BSC and was working in Washington when Dahl appeared on the scene, recalled that the intelligence operative who first approached him did not pull any punches. “For security reasons I can’t tell you what sort of a job it would be,” the agent had told him. “All I can say is that if you join us, you mustn’t be afraid of forgery, and you mustn’t be afraid of murder.” Dahl’s contact was probably similarly vague, assuring him that the skullduggery was a matter of routine and that security considerations prohibited him from saying more. In the meantime, Dahl was told he had better stay in touch.