Dahl also got to know Pearson’s main competitor, Walter Winchell, whose column was syndicated in an astonishing one thousand newspapers, which together with his hugely popular Sunday radio show made him a force to be reckoned with. By the advent of the war, Winchell was a powerhouse widely feared because of his penchant for exposing the private lives of important public men—from mistresses and pregnancies to divorces—which gave him plenty of bargaining chips to trade for information about what was going on inside their businesses or agencies. He had morphed from a Broadway critic to a political commentator who thought nothing of weighing in on domestic and international affairs, from warning Americans that “isolation ends where it always ends—with the enemy on our doorstep,” to inaugurating a regular feature called “The Winchell Column vs. the Fifth Column.” A typical Winchell column would contain several dozen separate references to individuals and events, ranging from minor celebrity sightings, along the lines of spotting Marlene Dietrich at the Stork Club, his nightly hangout, to an impassioned denunciation of Nazi sympathizers or some other disreputable homegrown fascists.
While there were a number of prominent American journalists who were sympathetic to the British plight, Lippmann, Pearson, and Winchell went beyond publishing Ministry of Information handouts to actively aiding the cause whenever they could, and they were in close contact with British intelligence. Like Ingersoll, they, too, were often accused of being on the British payroll, though they had plenty of company in their surrogate form of combat. There was a long list of ink-stained crusaders who had been fighting against Hitler and Mussolini since as far back as 1933—among them Dorothy Thompson and Edmund Taylor—and who had proved helpful to the BSC in its covert campaign against isolationism and defeatism.
Dahl also met Ernest Cuneo, the affable, Falstaffian attorney and sidekick to Winchell, who was known to be a member of Roosevelt’s “palace guard” and a behind-the-scenes operator bar none. A thirty-three-year-old lawyer of Italian descent, Cuneo had served as an aide to congressman and New York City mayor Fiorello La Guardia and was every bit as colorful and engaging a character as his former boss. A college football star gone to fat, he was almost as wide as he was tall and was a much-beloved figure in media circles. When Roosevelt was elected to office in 1932, Cuneo had followed his Columbia Law mentor Adolf Berle to Washington and served as the administration’s troubleshooter, eventually becoming associate counsel of the Democratic National Committee. When war broke out, he added to his portfolio the duties of White House liaison officer with British Security Coordination, the OSS, the FBI, and the Departments of Justice and State.
What Dahl was only then beginning to understand was that Cuneo had such close ties to the BSC that he was considered a member of the club, had his own code name—CRUSADER—and was empowered to “feed” select British intelligence items about Nazi sympathizers and subversives to Pearson, Winchell, and other handpicked outlets. At the time, he was actually ghostwriting many of Winchell’s columns and radio broadcasts, which parroted the British propaganda line of the day. For the BSC, journalists like Ingersoll, Lippmann, Pearson, Reid, and Winchell, and the facilitator Cuneo, were stealth operatives in their campaign against Britain’s enemies in America. “The conduct of political warfare was entirely dependent on secrecy,” states the official history of the BSC’s intelligence operations. “For that reason the press and radio men with whom BSC agents maintained contact were comparable with subagents and the intermediaries with agents. They were thus regarded.”
Whatever complaints embassy officials might have had with him personally, Dahl felt he was more than doing his bit for crown and country, and he was banking on his minor celebrity to stave off the threatened dismissal. In the meantime, he had taken Marsh into his confidence and explained that he was doing a little hush-hush work with an eye to getting himself transferred to intelligence. Far from being surprised, Marsh had already guessed as much and offered his assistance. “Of course, my father knew he was a spy,” said Antoinette. “They talked about it and my father said, ‘Look here, we’re on the same team, we can help each other.’” They both wanted the same things—Britain’s survival and an Allied victory—and Marsh was Machiavellian enough to think he could help Dahl while helping himself. “He got a huge kick out of it,” added Antoinette. “He always said that he was a spy during the war, too.” While Marsh regarded it as something of a lark and often made light of their joint espionage activities, Antoinette recalled that Dahl took the work very seriously: “Roald was a real patriot. He did it for the war effort, and he dedicated himself to it.”
Marsh took Dahl under his wing and gave him the benefit of his years of experience in Washington politics. He had the veteran newspaperman’s instinct for the inside scoop, nose for bull, and appetite for Capitol Hill scuttlebutt. Marsh was on a first-name basis with everyone in town who mattered, and he knew about the skeletons in their closets and the scandals in their home states. If he did not have all the answers, he knew who did, and more often than not he offered to place the call. He was an invaluable source for Dahl, a walking, talking encyclopedia of Washington life, from the stiff state dinners and senatorial committees to the “unofficial” hotel room conferences. He knew Washington was composed of tycoons, lobbyists, lawyers, deal makers, and fixers of every stripe, as well as legions of amiable young “government girls” with good legs and better memories. An inveterate memo writer who made his long-suffering secretary take down dozens of pages of dictation each day, Marsh, according to Ingersoll, would call Dahl in and debrief him, then spell out a cable for him to transmit to his bosses, saying, “I want this message to get through to 10 Downing Street right quickly and straight. Mark it urgent on your report, eyes only to your people.” Then Claudia, his timid stenographer, who was always seated silently nearby and wore a perennial look of alarm on her face whenever asked to take something down, would start hammering away on her machine as he began waking up and down and dictating, still clad in silk pajamas and a brightly embroidered Chinese gown.
Occasionally, when Marsh had information he wanted to impart to Churchill that he thought was over the head of the relatively junior assistant air attaché, he would announce self-importantly that he was going to summon Isaiah Berlin, the British Embassy’s brilliant, all-knowing London liaison, who communicated directly with the Foreign Office, various Whitehall departments, and the Cabinet Office. For his part, Berlin was put off by the American press baron’s eccentric circumlocution—“staccato, disjointed sentences”—and overweening self-regard. Marsh “gave the impression of being powerful, not to say sinister,” Berlin recalled, but he was always left feeling that there was something not quite right about him, “a screw faintly loose somewhere—and I felt rather frightened of him, as if in the presence of someone slightly unbalanced.” Marsh in turn, disliked the pale, pudgy Berlin, whom he and Dahl dubbed “the White Slug.”
When Dahl required specific information, Marsh instructed him to submit written questions. Typically, Marsh would respond with another memo. They communicated in this manner, trading everything from brief handwritten notes and telegrams to voluminous typed letters throughout the war. The pedagogical aspect of their relationship is evident in a short note Marsh fired off to Dahl after he took advantage of their arrangement on a recent occasion. “You woke me at four this morning, and you bumped me out of bed at five,” he scolded Dahl, addressing the pilot as if he were a recalcitrant pupil. “You had an idea. You wanted to send information quickly and had been too timid to say so. Next time put the time element in mind. Time is the essence in every contract—and I think, contact.” When Marsh had a lecture to impart, he would say, “Dahl, let’s go for a walk,” and he would be off, striding down 17th Street with his long, awkward gait, his arms swinging to and fro, holding forth on everything from a politician’s potentialities to the most intimate aspects of a well-known public figure’s sex life.
To help boost his standing at the embassy, Marsh arranged for Dahl
to meet with important people in government and to apprise them of the RAF’s accomplishments. He sent him over to see the vice president to show him photographs of the damage done by the two-ton bombs dropped by British Lancasters. The photographs, taken from 30,000 feet and blown up to a size of about six feet by four feet, were striking examples of British air power, which Dahl argued were still superior to that of the United States. Dahl used the photos as a graphic illustration of the fact that the British were now causing about two and a half times the damage to the Germans as the Germans ever did to them, largely due to the greater bomb load of their bombers. In addition, the British had found that incendiaries were fully as important as high-explosive bombs; he reported that they were dropping about one thousand pounds of incendiaries for every fifteen hundred pounds of high explosives.
Impressed, the vice president invited Dahl to sit in on his next meeting, with Major Alexander P. de Seversky of Russia, who was coming to brief him on the “airplane of the future.” The famous aviation expert had crashed a bomber in 1915 and lost a leg in the process, and Dahl had read about his experiences in a recent issue of Reader’s Digest. Disney’s first feature-length war film, Victory Through Air Power, was based on Seversky’s best-selling book by the same name, and Dahl had heard a great deal about the man and his advanced theories from Walt Disney. The major, who had been in the United States as an aeronautical engineer since the early 1920s, had developed a high-altitude pursuit plane and pushed aggressively to upgrade America’s military aviation program, claiming it could not compete with the German Luftwaffe, in the process earning a reputation as a radical and a bit of a nut job. After America entered the war, Seversky’s ideas on air strategy came to be regarded by many as farsighted, but he was no less controversial. The Disney movie reportedly featured his design for a long-range multigun bomber that more closely resembled a Buck Rogers science fiction fantasy than anything that existed.
A confident salesman, Seversky informed Dahl and Wallace that in his opinion the airplane of the future would probably have a range of 5,000 miles, and would be able to carry a load of 100 to 200 tons. At one point, he went so far as to imply that the United States, England, and Russia had between them all the necessary geography from which to fly the planes and “control the entire world.” Wallace endeavored to bring him down to earth by explaining that he thought it would be necessary to include Latin America and China, and that it was his fervent wish that the technology did not end up in too few hands. After Seversky left, Dahl quietly advised Wallace that the British air people considered the Russian “persona non grata.”
The arrival of the British foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, in March 1943 provided the perfect occasion for Marsh to aid Dahl in his intelligence work. Eden’s visit was hailed as the opening of serious discussions on the part of the Allies to consider peace aims and postwar problems. On the heels of Eden’s departure at the end of the month, Dahl sent Marsh a long shopping list of questions, eleven in all, clearly prompted by his superiors and drawing on his mentor’s information and insight. While the first few are routine inquiries about Marsh’s take on the growing opposition to Roosevelt, the upcoming 1944 election, and the Republican challenger’s chances, the latter half of the questions probe more delicate issues of diplomacy, such as Roosevelt’s opinion of Eden as a politician and to what extent his opinion was shared by Henry Wallace and Adolf A. Berle, the assistant secretary of state. Berle was a rising star in the administration and an important figure to the British as he served as the State Department’s intelligence liaison with the White House. He was also the negotiator on the extremely sensitive problem of postwar air routes and who would have the lion’s share of this huge prospective market. Dahl also asked for Marsh’s nuanced assessment of Roosevelt’s other top aides in terms of their character, intelligence, and efficacy. With the Yalta summit looming, the British clearly expected a showdown with Russia and wanted to pick his brain about which aides Roosevelt would be bringing to negotiate the shape of postwar Europe.
Marsh’s twelve-page typed response tackled Dahl’s questions in order, in each case providing a thumbnail sketch of the key players and laying out the most likely scenario in his exuberant, colloquial political shorthand. He was casually blunt: Roosevelt “is our best politician and will know how to make the people love him as they pick black beasts of isolationism”; Thomas E. Dewey, his Republican opponent, is “a liar”; and Wendell Willkie, who was running against FDR again, is “absolutely unpredictable as a politician and unreliable as a trader.” Marsh particularly warmed to the topic of Roosevelt’s view of the British foreign secretary and the upcoming summit:
Eden is respected by Roosevelt as a good political workman who thinks post war more like he does than any other Englishman of power, but Roosevelt recognizes Churchill and not Eden is boss, so has his tongue in his cheek. Wallace believes Eden is top British mind on post war and would be invaluable in any semi-final late 1943 conference at Moscow.
Since Berle and State expect to do the Russian preliminaries it is too early to say whether Roosevelt will select Wallace to work with Eden and Molotov at Moscow or whether he will drift with State. Berle today goes toward Russia for the first time in a public speech at Reading, Pennsylvania…. Berle poses as an expert on Russia in the State Department. Moscow has his number and won’t have him around when the time comes. Probably Roosevelt will string him along until the time of the decision but will go into the Russian semi finals with people who can get things done and who have a good press in Moscow. It probably will be Wallace and Eden and Molotov reporting back to Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, unless Roosevelt is afraid of sacrificing Wallace and also afraid of offending Secretary Hull, who could veto because of his political power with Southern senators controlling Foreign Relations….
The fact that Roosevelt is believed to have consented to Russian-British agreements but refused himself to consent because of his Constitutional limitations does not mean a thing in the finals as far as Roosevelt is concerned as it is a mere finesse. He merely let the British get into the water first. He expects to get in at the proper time in the Russian bath with Stalin and then in a three-way scrubbing match with Stalin and Churchill.
At the end of his visit, Eden extended an invitation to Berle to come to England, and Berle was eager to accept and hear them out on the problem of aviation and investment. Aside from Sumner Welles, no senior officer from the State Department had been allowed to travel outside Washington since 1940. Dahl’s superiors wanted to know the likelihood that Berle would be granted permission to make the trip, and Dahl pressed Charles for his view. Marsh speculated:
Berle may go to England if he gets the President at the right time and place which in Berle’s language, is the late afternoon, alone, after the President has had a couple of Old-fashioneds and is willing to take on a couple of new ideas. Berle will spring his best ideas at the proper time and place hoping that the President will then say, “Jump on a plane for London,” which is all he needs against a Hull or a Welles blockade. He is a daring young man on a flying trapeze and is willing to chance some effort to move from position number three to position number one. He is a great genius as a flatterer, is extremely industrious in reading all reports, and thus gathering a phoney reputation as a deep thinker and a perfectionist on a timetable.
He may wait until Welles is sick from overwork and regretfully take his place at the “request” of Hull to the President. If Eden did not catch the true Berle I would suggest that Eden was overtired.
Dahl knew that from the BSC’s perspective, his friendship with Marsh provided them with not only a unique vantage point onto the administration’s thinking but also unrivaled access to FDR’s left-wing vice president. Wallace was of great interest to the British because Roosevelt was not immortal—there were constant rumors that the strain of the war was taking a toll on FDR’s already fragile health—and if anything should happen to him, Wallace was next in line. To Americans, Roosevelt’s heal
th was practically an article of faith, and as Dahl discovered, even mentioning the subject in passing was considered tasteless beyond description. His superiors, however, were practically paranoid about the conspiracy of silence surrounding FDR’s condition. If he caught a cold, they wanted to know about it. Wallace’s firm identification with the causes of social justice at home and abroad was also cause for worry. He was perenially trying to invest the war with a moral purpose and warned that if the nations returned to the status quo when it was over, it would have been a failure. He was also strenuously opposed to imperialism and given to making critical comments about England’s relations with India that could be interpreted as anti-British and which did not sit well with London.
Unbeknownst to Dahl at the time, the head of SIS, Stewart Graham Menzies—always discreetly referred to as “C” in government circles outside the organization—regarded Wallace as “that menace,” a man who had spent years under the spell of Nicholas Konstantin Roerich, a Russian guru and charlatan who was suspected of being a Communist agent. Among a long list of questionable activities, Roerich had been agitating Tibetans against the British Indian empire. Wallace eventually broke with Roerich but not before their association made headlines suggesting that Wallace dabbled in the occult sciences, which put a permanent black mark by his name.
The Irregulars Page 7