The Irregulars

by Jennet Conant

  Among the things on Berle’s agenda was to tactfully let the British know that the United States intended to keep the Soviets informed of the progress of the air talks and of their intention to include them in the discussions, either in London or Washington. The meeting between Berle and Beaverbrook in London did not go well. Wallace heard a bitter summary of the conference from Marsh, who most likely had it from Dahl: “Both Berle and Beaverbrook approached the problem from a competitive, nationalistic standpoint of profits for big air companies, and from the standpoint of reconciling competitive positions between the different companies so that they might make the most money.” The “tragedy,” as Wallace later reflected in his diary, was that both countries were focused on the coming defense boom, and the consumer point of view was not represented. Some of the vice president’s idealism must have rubbed off on Dahl—along with his oft-repeated phrase “the greatest good to the greatest number”—because the young airman was outraged that private greed would trump public interest. Dahl had become fiercely committed to the idea that this clash of air imperialists had to be eliminated so that civilization could reap the full benefits of modern aviation.

  In the end, the Senate subcommittee never got anywhere. It turned out Pan Am had a stooge on the committee, Senator Ralph Brewster, a Republican from Maine, who openly favored a monopoly and whose job it was to line up enough noses for the airline to secure the right to handle American air interests in foreign negotiations. Brewster miscalculated, however, in part because Bennett Clark, after waffling, chose not to side with the monopoly lobby and stayed with the president’s position. Then the independent airlines started a nationwide publicity campaign to oppose Pan Am, so that a number of senators who had previously been persuaded to vote for the monopoly declined to go along with the program, and a majority vote was never reached.

  Dahl was immensely pleased with the small part he had played in foiling Pan American’s monopolistic scheme. Even then the punishment of greed was a salient theme. From the very beginning, the American airline company had behaved dishonorably and had tried to acquire landing rights and develop commercial interests on the back of its wartime contracts. In its relentless quest for worldwide air supremacy, Pan Am had pitted one government against the other, driven its own bargains for exclusive agreements, operated under the “closed sky” system to its own advantage, and engaged in all manner of aerial skullduggery. The net result had been diplomatic chaos, which in turn had discouraged international cooperation, competition, and progress.

  There was no sign, however, that America’s “chosen instrument” intended to reform its ways. Even after the setback on the subcommittee, Pan Am continued its thinly concealed campaign for control of American foreign aviation. Aware of this, the BSC kept the company under close scrutiny. British intelligence would later present Beaverbrook with evidence showing that Pan Am president Juan Trippe had negotiated a secret deal with Alfred Cecil Critchley, the managing director of BOAC, during his visit to the United States some months earlier. The two men were conspiring to perpetuate the cartel system and had struck a deal essentially giving Pan Am the cream of the North Atlantic routes, while agreeing to stay out of Europe, with BOAC getting the Continent and agreeing to stay out of South America. As this was not declared policy, and neither of the two companies had the authority to negotiate such a deal, Beaverbrook immediately put an end to it.

  GOOD VALUE

  As you often say, you get much out of your visits to my house of ill fame.

  —CHARLES MARSH to Dahl

  BY THE SPRING of 1944, Dahl had less to occupy him than usual and was at loose ends. His primary target, Henry Wallace, had departed for a long trip through Asia on May 20 and was not expected back until early July. The First Lady was also away traveling the world, which meant that his White House invitations had dried up. Deprived of his high-level sources, Dahl’s supply of gossip, rumors, and political intrigue was reduced to a trickle. While he waited for his prey to return, he spent his days trolling Capitol Hill watering holes, trading mundane intelligence items with Marsh, Pearson, Lippmann, and company. He was amused to learn that his friend Creekmore Fath, who had been drafted and sent to the West Coast, had landed a job with American intelligence. He had reportedly used his close ties to Mrs. Roosevelt to get her to ask the president to have him transferred. He was now in New York working for the OSS in civilian clothes and might prove a fount of information.

  Fortunately, the Georgetown social scene continued unabated. Dahl made the rounds of his weekly poker games and played bridge with everyone from Commerce Secretary Jesse Jones and the celebrated shipbuilder Henry Kaiser (whose amazing war production was one of the miracles of American know-how) to the popular Brazilian ambassador Carlos Martins. Evalyn Walsh McLean kept up her sparkling entertainments, despite the fact that most hostesses exercised restraint and had cut back on parties and frivolous spending, bearing in mind that their small sacrifices at home were nothing compared to the hardships of the front.

  Dahl had rather a soft spot for the plucky dowager, who served as a volunteer air-raid warden and wore her uniform, helmet and all, to dinner on nights when alerts were expected. Since January the War Department had ordered practice alerts along the eastern seaboard, and periodically air-raid sirens would sound the warning of a blackout. On those occasions, she allowed plane spotters to stomp through her ornate mansion to take their positions on the roof, while she patrolled the streets of Georgetown, the Hope diamond tucked inside her shirt, the two-inch-wide diamond cuffs on her wrists gleaming even in the dark. Dahl always accepted her invitations with alacrity and relished his undercover role as house detective. In his letters home, Dahl noted that dining at Mrs. McLean’s was always “good value,” as he put it, because it was “like going to the circus and getting a free meal served into the bargain.” As he could not write about what he was really up to, Dahl instead sought to amuse his mother with descriptions of the gaudy excesses of Mrs. McLean’s soirées, where “everything was gold”—from the candelabras and place settings to the cutlery.

  Pearson, who like Dahl was a regular at Friendship, reported that one night their irrepressible hostess informed the table that Henry Wallace attended “mystic séances.” Apparently she also attended said séances, but not at the same time as the vice president, so she had never actually laid eyes on him “under the spell.” Pearson regarded her testimony as complete hearsay but said it was being repeated all over Washington in the vein of another weird Wallace story. When Dahl passed this amusing morsel on to Marsh, he was none too pleased. He was incensed that McLean would go about maligning the vice president’s reputation in his absence and snapped that it was “further evidence of what a lovely lady she is.”

  Even when he was out of the country, Wallace managed to be controversial. His pamphlet on the Pacific was published that spring and brought forth the expected cries of outrage from British officialdom. Lord Halifax, on orders from Churchill, registered a formal protest with Cordell Hull, the secretary of state, objecting to the “regrettable” statements made by the vice president. Halifax reportedly stressed that Wallace’s timing could not have been worse: major joint military operations were under way, and Overlord was on the verge of being launched. Other British military representatives in Washington were quick to point out that Wallace’s statements raised serious security issues. The Dutch ambassador, Alexander Loudon, was much disturbed by Wallace’s demand that the date of “liberation” of colonial subjects should be specifically announced, and he arranged a meeting with Hull to discuss it. When Dr. Loudon arrived at his office, he spotted Wallace’s pamphlet on the desk, but before the ambassador could utter a single word, Hull reportedly asked him whether he had read that “bunk.” (It may have been “junk.”) In any case, this went a long way to assuaging the ambassador’s pique.

  When the first intimations of trouble reached Wallace, he asked Marsh what if any reaction he had heard from his British friends. Marsh, laughing, reported
that Dahl “had been very much excited” by the whole business. As Wallace observed in his diary, “Apparently while I was gone, the entire British Secret Service was shaking with indignation as well as the British Foreign Office. Dahl said to Marsh at the height of his indignation, ‘This is very serious. You know Churchill is likely to ask the President to get a new Vice President.’ Charles replied merely by saying, ‘Don’t be a child. Grow up. Don’t you know that the most certain way to be sure that Wallace will continue to be Vice President is for the word to get around that Churchill is against him?’” Marsh, who had oddly mismatched blue eyes, which could switch in an instant from warm to coldly objective, dismissed the episode as just another diplomatic tempest in a teapot. While the future of the empire was a topic dear to the British heart, he did not think it warranted the degree of melodrama the air attaché invested in it and told him as much. Dahl only wished he could be half as sanguine about the BSC’s response and what it might bode for the vice president’s future.

  A few weeks later Dahl attended a dinner at Friendship during which Evalyn Walsh McLean entered into a spirited debate about the British secret service with Congressman Martin Dies, a big, burly, sharp-tongued Texan who was chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Dies, who despised FDR and his liberal administration, liked to position himself as a superpatriot committed to rooting out subversives, and his committee had barraged the Justice Department with hundreds of documents aiding in the prosecution of Nazis, fascists, and Japanese agents. Dies had been holding forth about the extent to which Churchill was kept well informed by his secret service when Mrs. McLean indignantly interrupted him and protested that he should not “talk nonsense.” J. Edgar Hoover was her best friend, and he always maintained that the American intelligence service was far superior. Insisting that the British secret service was “no damn good,” she stared directly at Dahl.

  Trying to sound blasé, Dahl, who was seated next to the actress Constance Bennett, commented offhandedly that he had always heard that British intelligence “was the best in the world.” Dies wholeheartedly agreed, and told Evalyn she did not know what she was talking about and was wrong on all counts. Mrs. McLean refused to back down and claimed she had it on good authority that the British did not know “half of what is going on.” They argued the issue back and forth until Mrs. McLean thirstily called for more champagne, and Dahl maneuvered the conversation onto less dangerous terrain.

  Afterward Dahl wrote up the priceless exchange, adding it to his weekly compilation of material, and passed it on to be disseminated to higher authorities. He could not resist entertaining Marsh with his vivid account and gave him a copy of his Friendship revue, which he had artfully composed in the form of a musical comedy, featuring Constance Bennett drunkenly chorusing “Oh balls!” at regular intervals. Marsh invariably shared Dahl’s snatches of gossip with Wallace and other close friends, so that the stories enjoyed remarkably swift and wide circulation in Washington.

  Dahl’s lack of discretion was dangerous. Once he started playing childish games, he could never help wanting to play them to the hilt. It had gotten him into trouble before, and Marsh should have cautioned him about being too free with his inside reports, lest his trademark sarcasm and pungent one-liners betray his identity. The American publisher, however, enjoyed it all far too much to want to discourage Dahl, and if anything he was guilty of encouraging him. Throughout that winter, they had merrily carried on their intemperate correspondence, regularly exchanging letters ridiculing Anglo-American relations, impugning each other’s characters and credibility, and savaging all those in their incestuous Georgetown circle—from Evalyn Walsh McLean and Cissie Patterson to Isaiah Berlin—as imposters and potential enemy agents. Dahl had continued his practice of using British Embassy stationery, composing colorful little notes that positively oozed condescension on every page, and gleefully sending them in the ambassador’s name, typing at the end of each one, “Yours Very truly, HALIFAX.” He stopped short of actually forging the ambassador’s name, however, and omitted a handwritten signature. For added effect, he secured the heavy buff-colored envelopes with red wax and the embossed embassy seal and wrote “SECRET” or “BY HAND/CONFIDENTIAL” on the front. It was pure escapism, all cheap satire, lewd insinuations, and swaggering sexuality—a way to lampoon a war that had dragged on too long and was far more arduous than anyone had thought possible. That it might be regarded as very bad form for a BSC operative to pen such foolishness seems not to have troubled Dahl in the least.

  Dahl and Marsh constantly teased, taxed, and challenged each other. In a tongue-in-cheek letter dated February 12, 1944, and addressed to “The Mother of Roald,” sent to him at the British Embassy, Marsh wrote that it had come to his attention that the “more-or-less infamous” author of The Gremlins had copied his ideas from an obscure book of Japanese fairy tales. He was apprehensive that plagiarism might be the least of his transgressions, and that Dahl, “seduced a bit for fame,” might be guilty of “trafficking mentally with the enemy”:

  I’ve had some slight acquaintance with your son and his face seems open and kind. His personality is not one which would suggest any fraud…. Can you enlighten me somewhat about his childhood. Did he, between the age of two and twelve, display flights of fancy which a mother would call plain lies? Did the family by any chance have Japanese connections? Obviously your son is too inarticulate to be a student of Japanese.

  Ten days later Marsh received a tart reply, purportedly from Halifax, informing him that his letter to Mrs. Dahl had been intercepted by the British Embassy’s censors and was a matter of serious concern. The letter went on to say that the ambassador shared his suspicions about the airman and had ordered an investigation to be conducted along the very lines Marsh had suggested. A preliminary report had already revealed that Dahl had once engaged in a “tawdry affair” with a Japanese girl whom he had met on a coastal steamer in 1939, while traveling from Zanzibar to Dar es Salaam, and that he had been observed “to pinch her twice on the afterdeck.” Clearly, this was evidence that he had been consorting with the enemy, and further investigation was warranted….

  Marsh’s even more facetious follow-up, addressed to “My Dear Lord Halifax,” opens with an apology for his being an “ignorant American,” but hastens to add that he is confident that any lapse in manners on his part will be overlooked because “you, as a great gentleman, have an innate sense of democracy and are not a stickler for form and ceremony”:

  To get to the nuts of the thing: You have a fellow named Dahl working at your shop who has had his points. In fact, he has been of slight use here and there due largely to his personal belief in himself. I am reminded of the quote, “Fools often go in where angels fear to tread….”

  I attach here the proof that this ex-patriot of Norway, a mercenary for pay of his Majesty’s, the King, has used your name in a most fraudulent manner. He has even plagiarized your character and expressions. He has, of course, feloniously used the EMBASSY STAMP.

  At the bottom of the page, Marsh added a postscript in ink: “I leave this entirely to your intelligence. I deny emphatically the broad American viewpoint that you have no imagination.”

  The indignant rejoinder arrived four days later. Written on pale blue embassy letterhead, it defends His Majesty’s employee against all spurious accusations and instead charges that Marsh is obviously a “troublemaker” and an “evil influence.” After throwing down this gauntlet, Dahl has the ambassador pulling his investigators off his assistant air attaché’s case and putting them to work looking into Marsh’s “murky career.” Their early reports suggest that Charles E. Marsh, with homes in Washington, Culpepper County, Virginia, and Cape Cod, is “a sinister character who is known to operate from his home on R Street.” Furthermore, Marsh is regarded as someone who is easily “hoodwinked” and to this end is regularly visited by a parade of German spies disguised as leading American politicians, most notably one who bears an uncanny resemblance to Vice Preside
nt Wallace and is in fact an agent by the name of Kurt Schweinhogger. Marsh is also known to surround himself with attractive women, and “it is probable he is subject to some form of blackmail by at least one of these ladies.” The letter goes on to say that the FBI is aware of this matter, and the only reason it has not stepped in is that all the information passed on by Marsh is so “misleading and garbled” as to be nearly incomprehensible and consequently poses no real threat. Halifax concludes the letter by saying that he will be forwarding a copy of his investigators’ report to the secretary of commerce, Jesse Jones.

  One evening just before Wallace left for China, Marsh, who was in a particularly expansive mood, showed the vice president samples of the illicit correspondence he had been carrying on with their mutual friend at the British Embassy. “The views attributed to Halifax were most amusing,” Wallace noted in his diary, adding, “I am afraid Dahl has been rather irreverent.”

  Dahl and Marsh were so pleased with their humorous send-up of international diplomacy and espionage that they approached the New York publisher Curtice Hitchcock about possibly collaborating on a book together. The movie project with Wallace had long since petered out, and Dahl, always on the lookout for money-making enterprises and eager to retain the support of his generous patron, was casting about for a new joint venture. On April 22 Hitchcock wrote Dahl that he was sure the book would be “a tremendous hit,” and if it went over as big in both England and the United States as he expected it would, “we shall be able to laugh ourselves out of some of the pain and casualties of this war”: