The Irregulars

by Jennet Conant

  After a pleasant interval, it was decided they should visit Miss Sara Delano, an aged cousin who, they were forewarned, was quite a character. The whole party piled back into their cars and, with the president and Princess Martha leading the way, drove a goodly distance on the main road to her home in a neighboring village. Miss Delano turned out to be an attractive woman of sixty who looked closer to forty, had purple hair, wore trousers, and owned thirty red setters. She made them all very stiff drinks and handed the president a Tom Collins with three hefty measures of gin.

  Miles, his tongue loosened by all the alcohol, managed to be totally inappropriate again and asked the president what he thought of Churchill as a postwar premier. The president gave him only two good years after the war had finished. The conversation drifted to Roosevelt’s own political problems, and he conceded that Americans were growing restless and had seen too much of him over the last ten years and “would do anything for a change.” If they got the change they wanted, he bet the next fellow would barely be getting started before voters would be shouting and yelling to go back to what they had before. They moved on to a discussion of the Republican candidates. Roosevelt had a grudging admiration for Willkie and made it clear he was the only one of the lot he could envision in the office. By the time they decided to head home, it was raining, and the president opted to make the return journey in one of the closed cars. This left Jimmy to operate FDR’s peculiar contraption with no pedals, with Dahl and Miles for passengers, so that the trip back was a memorable one. They said good night to the president at the Big House and returned to the cottage for supper with Mrs. Roosevelt and other members of the family.

  By the end of the visit, Dahl found himself more impressed with the homely First Lady than with her husband. As he later told Marsh, she was no fool and wrote every word of her “My Day” column herself. She had strong opinions and could be surprisingly candid, particularly about anyone she disliked. When he had asked what she thought of Adolf Berle, she had made a face that left no doubt as to how she felt. The Roosevelts clearly had a complex relationship, but Eleanor had worked out an arrangement in which she played the role of a super-secretary, screening calls, deciding who would get in to see the president and who would not, and discussing issues with advisers like Morgenthau. Dahl estimated she shouldered “about ten percent” of her husband’s workload. “The President’s attitude toward her is that she is good help,” he told Marsh. “She is very aware of his moods and ‘plays’ him very effectively. She has found out how to have a minimum of conflict.” He found it interesting that before he left, she had taken the trouble to reassure him that the president was not unduly worried about the election problems on the home front, adding that he was “too old a hand” for that. His policy, she explained, was “to sit back and let everyone talk themselves to a standstill.” Dahl thought it was as good a description as any of what he had witnessed over the weekend.

  After Sunday-night supper, Dahl left to catch a late train to New York, where he had business to attend to. As Monday was the Fourth of July, Miles opted to stay on another night. Schaeffer deposited Dahl at the station, but he ended up having to borrow twenty-five dollars from the driver after discovering he had left all his money on the dressing-room table at the cottage. Despite his initial nervousness, it had been a marvelous weekend. It had been a relief just to escape the sticky heat and humidity—which was nothing unusual as Washington summers go, but to the British it was nothing short of oppressive. Dahl’s embassy colleagues had taken to fanning themselves limply in the corridors and complaining that they deserved “tropical post pay.” By comparison, Hyde Park, situated on a bluff overlooking the Hudson and surrounded by hundreds of acres of dense forest and shady walks, was, Dahl wrote Eleanor appreciatively, “like diving into the sea from the middle of Connecticut Avenue and not coming up for two days.” A few days later Mrs. Roosevelt’s reply arrived in the mail: “Miss Thompson and I appreciate your letter and are so glad you enjoyed the weekend. I hope very much you can find the time to come again.”

  Dahl considered the weekend to have been a great success. Over the three days, he had also found time to curry favor with Princess Martha. She and the children were headed to Long Island for the summer, and before he left she had told him to phone her the next time he was in New York. Her number was listed under the false name “Mrs. Aubert.” Dahl was astute enough, however, to devote his flattering, earnest attention to the First Lady. He spent a good deal of time talking to her faithful companion, Tommy, and although a stout, no-nonsense woman in her late forties, she had a quick, dry wit, and they got along famously. In his thank-you letter, addressed to “My Dear Mrs. Roosevelt,” Dahl promised to send along the information about mothers of Eagle Squadron boys that she had requested, and he went out of his way to express his great esteem for “Miss Thompson.” More invitations soon followed.

  As soon as he got back to Washington, Dahl prepared an exquisitely detailed twelve-page report of his stay at the presidential retreat for the BSC, filing it under the businesslike heading, “Visit to Hyde Park, July 2nd to 4th.” In it he faithfully recorded all of Roosevelt’s statements about Churchill, FDR’s recollections of various conversations between himself and the prime minister, his reflections immediately after the destroyer-for-bases deal, and on and on. Dahl made a copy of his report and gave it to Marsh. On July 6, over drinks at the R Street house, Dahl also gave Marsh the benefit of his personal impressions and speculations, following up on a few points he apparently felt were too scandalous to put down on paper.*

  He told a skeptical Marsh that he believed the president would “like to quit,” adding “I think it is 50-50 that he will if the war or anything else does not suit him. He certainly has not made up his mind finally.”

  As for the perennial rumors of a royal liaison between the princess and the president, Dahl was inclined to think that all the smoke indicated a real fire. “The Crown Princess never left the President for one minute,” he said. “She always called him ‘Sir,’ and rode with him right in the front seat and sat every meal at his side.” Of course, Dahl noted, this was only right and proper as she was royalty. While some of this could be put down to protocol, in his opinion “there was more to it than that.” Dahl believed that Roosevelt personally made sure that the lovely Norwegian was always by his side. “The President simply saw to it that it was done that way,” he said, adding, “The Crown Princess is a very high class lady. The President has it in his mind that he would like to sleep with her.”

  Most important, Dahl came away convinced that Roosevelt was “entirely under the influence of Churchill.” The president seemed to have the prime minister very much in mind. “He speaks of him constantly,” reported Dahl. “It is ‘What will Winnie do?’ and ‘What will he say?’ and ‘I communicated with Winnie four times today.’” Marsh later noted that “the British eyewitness” watching FDR was most positive on this point: “I am certain that Roosevelt is under the spell of Churchill,” Dahl hold him. “You can’t be fooled by an act. Roosevelt was consistently affectionate whenever he said the name ‘Winston’ and the name was constantly in the conversation.”

  The following morning, after mulling over Dahl’s “private report” of his visit to Hyde Park, Marsh reflected on the RAF pilot’s scrupulous honesty in a memo he dictated for his own files, concluding, “He is truthful. I judge this from two items in the report itself:

  He [Dahl] wanted to know if his friend Marsh was plus or minus with the President, so spoke of his country home simply to bring Marsh in. The fact that he put this in the report shows he left nothing out.

  The fact that he reported all details of his friend Richard’s [Miles] actions shows that he is both truthful and pitiless.

  Marsh also found it significant that Dahl had raised the subject of the vice president with Mrs. Roosevelt, knowing full well that he was working hard to keep his man Wallace on the ticket for FDR’s fourth term:

  The name of Wallace came up
with Mrs. Roosevelt while she was discussing a group of other persons, as she was speaking somewhat disparagingly of them. Dahl said: “What about Vice President Wallace?” Her approximate reply was: “He is not in their class.” When Dahl asked what she meant, he said, “She meant that Wallace had a standing as a person so much higher than them that she did not class them together.”

  At the end of Dahl’s verbal report, Marsh scribbled a note: “This young observer does not know that the President is a genius of shift and that if Stalin-Roosevelt becomes decisively important to Roosevelt, he will not be under any Churchill spell.” He added, “Remember a country squire at this moment is enjoying hugely the friendship of a queen-to-be.” Then he packaged up both reports and passed them on to Wallace. Someone—whether it was Marsh, Wallace, or a blushing secretary is unclear—scratched out the line about the president sleeping with the princess before consigning the report to the filing cabinet.

  In Marsh’s eyes, the fact that Dahl had voluntarily undertaken a little high-level snooping on his behalf was evidence that his friend was indeed a loyal spy. Only in the upside-down world of espionage, where things tended to happen for the least logical of reasons, could he have convinced himself that this was the case. Dahl, who thought Marsh was in his own way “as naïve as Wallace,” happily made use of his personal association with both men. In this complex web of relationships and layered obligations, his allegiance to Marsh took precedence. For the most part, Dahl occupied the ambiguous role of informer without suffering any undue torment about a divided life or the perils of commitment. He was not without scruples, but winning the war took precedence over all other considerations. Moreover, his friendship with Marsh rested on profound admiration, affection, and absolute trust. Similarly, despite knowing that Dahl was a British agent who considered everything he saw or heard as fair game for his weekly intelligence summaries, and might betray the confidence of friend and foe at the drop of a hat, Marsh’s faith in and fondness for his young protégé never wavered. Despite its inherent absurdity, their partnership continued to thrive.

  As a frequent guest at the White House and Hyde Park, Dahl soon won the confidence of the president and reported back to his superiors on their tête-à-têtes. He found opportunities to be alone with FDR, and during these unguarded moments they would engage in idle gossip, and the president would sometimes comment in passing on the bombing offensive in Germany or a new plan to sink U-boats. “I remember once walking into FDR’s little side room before lunch at Hyde Park on a Sunday morning, and he was making the martinis, as he always did, and he looked up at me. I was literally nobody to him, I was a friend of Eleanor’s. And he said, ‘I’ve just had a very interesting cable from Winston.’” It was Roosevelt’s way of letting Dahl know that he was aware that he was reporting back to British intelligence, and that part of the game was that neither of them acknowledged what the other was up to. On occasion, the president might drop a hint in order “to prepare London” about which way he was leaning on a particular issue. Dahl came away with the impression that FDR’s aim was not to divulge secrets so much as to try to prevent the serious divergences that often threatened to develop between their two countries.

  This cozy arrangement enabled Dahl to become a back-channel conduit of information. The president and Churchill were, through one means or another, in constant conversation during the war and did not necessarily rely on official liaison. In fact, because Halifax was regarded as a weak link, they used Harry Hopkins to such an extent that both the ambassador and the secretary of state had their noses permanently out of joint. Hardly a seasoned diplomat, Dahl was just one of many nimble young men who happened to be in the right place at the right time and were recruited to serve as intermediaries, “buffers” in the language of the trade, to establish an area of what Cuneo called “discreet indiscreet conversations.”

  It went without saying that this unofficial exchange of views could be far more frank than anything that could take place at the official level, and that according to the diplomatic fiction adhered to by both sides, the official services knew nothing about it. “My job really was to try to oil the wheels between the British and the American war effort, and they were often pretty rusty and creaky,” recalled Dahl. “I started going out and staying weekends at Hyde Park, and up there, of course, there were always Roosevelts, and people like Henry Morgenthau, and a lot of other cabinet ministers…. I was able to ask these fellows some quite pointed questions and get quite equally pointed replies from them which they would never have given to the ambassador or anyone like that. For instance, there might have been something going on between Churchill and Roosevelt inside the war effort, the second front, or the landing in Southern France, or the Mediterranean, which Winston wanted and FDR didn’t. And I could ask FDR what he felt about it over lunch and he would tell me quite openly, you see. Far more so I think than he would have told Winston in a cable.”

  Dahl would immediately pass on everything he heard to the BSC. By then, Stephenson’s domestic network of undercover spies and contacts was well established, with bureaus in most large American cities. He oversaw a sprawling, highly mechanized intelligence empire that had expanded to two floors of the International Building in Rockefeller Center, employed more than a thousand men and women—and nearly twice that number in Canada and Latin America—and occupied office space, studios, and hotel rooms scattered around New York and Washington. The long debate over Donovan’s domain had finally been settled, and the COI had been renamed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), and a branch in New York, under Allen Dulles, had been established a floor above the BSC in Rockefeller Center. “With unstinted and constant generosity, Stephenson lent his most trusted subordinates to assist,” said David Bruce, the highly regarded OSS officer who later became American ambassador in London. “Clothed in clandestinity, [they] provided an essential complement to military and political measures through covert means.”

  Roosevelt relied on Stephenson and his “trusted subordinates” to maintain this back channel for his secret dealings with Churchill. This arrangement afforded him much greater latitude, as well as a certain freedom from supervision by the nervous nellies and watchful old-school diplomats who infested the OSS in its early days. For everyone’s protection, it made sense to keep Dahl at arm’s length. It suited Stephenson for the air attaché to consider himself an outside agent, reporting to the BSC’s contacts in Washington rather than to the inner sanctum in New York. “You never spoke directly to him [Stephenson],” Dahl recalled. “You told someone else, and someone else told someone else, and then they told Bill.” Stephenson would, in turn, pass on any valuable information to London, and to Churchill.

  Dahl was persuaded that every little bit helped: “Although it was in a way bleeding information on the highest level from the Americans, he was doing it not for nefarious purposes but for the war effort.” As Robert Sherwood, the well-known American dramatist who did propaganda work for Donovan during this period, later admitted: “If the isolationists had known the full extent of the secret alliance between the U.S. and Britain, their demands for the President’s impeachment would have rumbled like thunder across the land.”

  Stephenson must have congratulated himself on his choice of the enthusiastic young airman, whose entrée with the Roosevelts could not have begun more innocently and who could now be exploited for Stephenson’s own ends. The BSC director belonged to the new school of intelligence chiefs who believed writers and intellectuals often made for the best and subtlest agents, and Dahl was turning out to be something of a find. He was a natural choice for their kind of work. He had a writer’s ear for the telling phrase and a talent for asking questions without appearing overly inquisitive. As a pilot and author, he also had legitimate cover, which was always the best kind. Dahl had maneuvered—or stumbled—into the role expected of him and was perfectly positioned to extend the BSC’s network of well-placed Washington sources.

  From Dahl’s perspective, there did not
seem to be anything terribly dangerous about what he was doing. It was not as though he was ransacking offices and rifling through diplomatic bags. He was simply a purveyor of information. The stuff he was passing along was useful, important even, but not vital. Whether or not his information would be exploited, or lead to any subsequent “action,” was determined by his masters in New York and in London. He had to watch his step, of course. The Monroe Doctrine made the BSC’s activities unpopular, and a mistake would prompt all sorts of embarrassing public questions, press scrutiny, and political controversy, which was the last thing a furtive organization wanted. Berle, a hard-charging forty-four-year-old Harvard lawyer, was already complaining about “the very considerable espionage” that the British were carrying on within the United States and would seize on any excuse to start another row about why they had been granted “free rein” in the first place. Strictly speaking, however, most of the stuff he was trafficking in was material that he was more or less entitled to know as an embassy attaché. If he was caught with notes—say, a report on the administration’s postwar air policies or even a file on American security arrangements—it would not really prove anything. A lot of what passed for espionage in those days could be described as enterprising reporting. Dahl was assured that he had nothing to worry about. As Stephenson was fond of saying, “That’s why our side has agents; the enemy has spies.”

  ONE LONG LOAF

  The army had a saying that bread is the staff of life and that the life of the staff is one long loaf.

  —BICKHAM SWEET-ESCOTT, Baker Street Irregular

  BY THE SUMMER of 1943, the focus of Dahl’s secret work in Washington consisted of staying close to Marsh and Wallace, and keeping “pretty careful tabs on his [the vice president’s] Communistic leanings and his friends in those quarters,” and reporting back to Stephenson. The official history makes frequent reference to Dahl’s undercover assignment as the “BSC officer in Washington” who was “in frequent consultation with Wallace.” It was not difficult for Dahl to keep track of their movements, as all three men were close friends and saw one another often. The vice president had become rather fond of the long-limbed British airman, in part because of his striking resemblance to his youngest son, Robert, who was in the army. Dahl and Wallace had much in common, sharing a dry sense of humor, a lively curiosity about the world, and a playful eccentricity that occasionally got them into trouble. They were both vigorous men—intellectually and physically—and enjoyed testing each other’s prowess in conversation as much as on the tennis court, where they both excelled. After their morning game, they often walked downtown to work together, their matching long strides perfectly in sync, boisterously debating who had had the better backhand. They were also daily visitors to Marsh’s R Street home, and though Wallace was more stiff-necked than Dahl, both reveled in the rowdy publisher’s high-spirited, profane company. “Henry Wallace was dropping in literally every afternoon for a chat,” recalled Dahl, who became accustomed to finding him with Marsh in the oak-paneled library, club chairs drawn close together. “He was a man without rudder and Charles gave him a lot of rudder. Of course, Marsh loved it because he got a bit of gossip and he felt closer to FDR.”