The Irregulars

by Jennet Conant

  One fall morning, as Dahl walked downtown with Wallace, who now worked in the massive gray Department of Commerce Building, he took advantage of their time together to lobby for the postwar alliance with the OSS. Dahl was “very complimentary about the high quality of the work done by the OSS under Donovan” and spoke warmly of “the very close friendship” that had continued since the beginning of the war between Donovan and Stephenson. Dahl told Wallace that America had benefited greatly from their close cooperation, pointing out that of the twenty German saboteurs discovered by the FBI, seventeen of them were apprehended because of advance information given to the FBI by the British secret service. He felt certain that such a reciprocal relationship would only help their countries in the future.

  Wallace listened courteously and did not voice any real objections, though he was privately of the opinion that integrating the intelligence services had “dangerous implications.” When Donovan had pushed for this move the previous October, Roosevelt had demurred, saying that he would first have to get clearance from the other agencies. Wallace did not believe that the departments of State, Army, Treasury, and Navy, to say nothing of his own Commerce Department, would all sign off on it, and he recorded his misgivings in his diary:

  [Dahl] thinks a combined American-English Secret Service is necessary to prevent the destructive possibilities of the bomb. In other words, Dahl envisions the United States and England working together to prevent Russia from blowing up Anglo-Saxon civilization and wants an American Secret Service which in fact will be under the thumb of the British Secret Service organization.

  At one point in their conversation, Dahl admitted to Wallace that he had become susceptible to the argument that the Soviets were intent on military expansion and was now “something of a Russophobe.” Wallace, who thought the hardliners were inviting conflict, told him: “Well, if you fear the Russians, it won’t be long until your fears are well founded.” He later reflected again in his diary on “how fond” he was of Dahl, and what “a nice boy” he was, but that he was necessarily biased: “He is working out problems from the standpoint of British policy, and British policy clearly is to provoke the maximum distrust between the United States and Russia and thus prepare the groundwork for World War III.”

  On a more conciliatory note, Dahl told Wallace a humorous tale about Churchill that he had recently heard from the navigator on one of the PM’s flights. Apparently Churchill was under doctor’s orders not to fly too high. So when the plane climbed to nine thousand feet, he naturally became concerned and asked someone onboard to check his pulse. One of the pilots, who had only a dim recollection of how this was done, went to the forward cabin in search of a stopwatch when a colleague took him aside and whispered in his ear, “Seventy-two.” So the pilot went back and took Churchill’s wrist, and when the stopwatch showed sixty seconds were up, he announced, “Seventy-two.” As Dahl told it, “Churchill grinned happily and said, ‘Pretty good for an old man, isn’t it?’” Wallace laughed and said that he “didn’t know of any story which better typified the spirit of England.”

  Dahl, who was worried he might be sent back to Canada, seized the opportunity to take a few weeks’ home leave. On October 19, he sailed on the Queen Elizabeth for England. It was a chance to celebrate the war’s end with his loved ones and catch up with his mother and sisters, who were hungry for news of his activities in America. For security reasons, he had not been able to tell them what he was doing. There was also a great deal of practical business that had to be attended to. The reality was that life in England after the war was not easy. The hard times and shortages were far from over, and he worried about his mother’s finances. They would all have to begin picking up the pieces of their lives and find a way forward. In theory, he could probably go back to work for Shell, but that was not in the cards. His younger sister, Asta, had accepted a posting in Norway and had written that Roald had been invited to apply as an assistant air attaché in Oslo. He told her he was not remotely interested. He was planning to leave the RAF altogether on what he considered “very reasonable medical grounds.”

  When he got back to Washington in early December, Dahl discovered he had sorely underestimated the new administration’s suspicions of the wily and unscrupulous British. The prevailing opinion was that if the British advocated a policy, it was because they had some ulterior and probably sinister motive. Donovan’s OSS never stood a chance. Just as in the movies, when the FBI called in the IRS to nab a particularly slippery villain, the administration used the Budget Bureau to finish off the OSS. It seemed that in the name of cutbacks, the government could do away with almost anything—especially when the president had given them the go-ahead. Donovan had been relieved of his command by executive order, and the OSS was abolished, its functions distributed between the departments of State and War. Truman wanted a “broad” service that was “attached to the President’s office.” The new Central Intelligence Agency, entrusted to new hands, was speedily approved.

  The former OSS director was given a pat on the back and a letter from Truman addressed to “My Dear General Donovan.” It acknowledged his “capable leadership” and assured him that America’s permanent intelligence services were “being erected on the foundation of the facilities and resources mobilized through the OSS during the war.” Before scattering to the winds, Donovan and his talented recruits assembled for a last time in the Riverside Skating Rink, one of the many Washington buildings the agency had taken over during the war. It was a subdued occasion, marked by proud speeches, tearful farewells, and that odd American penchant for hugging.

  Thankfully, the English did not go in for such sentimental displays. In any event, by late fall, most of Dahl’s BSC colleagues and old embassy pals had already packed up and cleared out. Stephenson had been tarred by the same brush as Donovan, and any hopes he may have had of carving out a postwar fiefdom died with the OSS. The atmosphere in Washington had soured. The general feeling was, the sooner they were all gone, the better. Dahl’s former roommate, Richard Miles, was happy to be leaving. He was excited about the victory of the Labour Party and hoped the new prime minister would follow through on his promise to steer the country, exhausted from so many years of war, to “a planned society” with better opportunity for all. England was undergoing dramatic changes on the domestic front, all of which spelled doom to the old class hierarchy. Miles thought Wallace should go to England and expressed the belief that the Prophet of the Common Man could “do a great deal of good with the new crowd.”

  Dahl’s pals Bryce and Ogilvy had been demobilized and were already busy planning their return to civilian life. Bryce had immediately fallen back on his indolent ways. After being let out of the BSC shortly after VJ Day, he and his wife had decamped to Jamaica, where some years earlier she had purchased a small plantation. The property, located in an area known as Red Hills, included a handsome eighteenth-century stone “great house” called Bellevue, which once belonged to Admiral Nelson and, according to legend, was haunted. Beautifully situated atop a small mountain, it looked down over the green Jamaican hills and, in the distance, the glimmering outline of Kingston and the Port Royal peninsula. Bryce had a natural affinity for the slow pace of island life and decided to settle there permanently, passing his days socializing, fussing over his fruit trees, and doing a bit of farming. He had what Cuneo called “a violent addiction to being left undisturbed,” and there was no place more undisturbed on earth than Bellevue.

  As it happened, Stephenson also regarded the island as an ideal hideout and made use of it throughout the war. On one occasion, he borrowed Bryce’s villa, sending an ill and overworked Noël Coward there for a badly needed rest cure. In December 1942 the singer-composer was, according to his diary, “exhausted and almost voiceless” after a strenuous tour of troop concerts in Europe and a series of Christmas broadcasts in New York, made at the special request of Henry Morgenthau. Stephenson, who had invited Coward to spend Christmas with him and his wife in New York, w
orried that he was on the verge of a breakdown and insisted he take a holiday to restore his health. As in everything the BSC chief did, Coward’s stay on Jamaica was arranged with “impeccable secrecy”: he was met at the airport by a naval officer who whisked him off to Bryce’s mountaintop retreat and, after fourteen luxurious days of semiseclusion, was driven back in the still-dark early-morning hours to the airport. “The spell was cast,” recalled Coward, “and I knew I should come back.”

  The island had the same romantic hold on Fleming, though Bryce never quite understood why. In the middle of the war, the two friends discovered that they were both scheduled to attend the same high-level Anglo-American naval intelligence conference in Jamaica and were overjoyed at the idea of escaping their respective cubicles for a brief rendezvous in the Caribbean. Four dismal, rain-choked days later they had boarded the plane back to Washington. Bryce, who had long wanted to show Fleming his “magic island,” was thoroughly disgusted. It had rained ceaselessly, the sun never once appeared, and they spent their nights trapped in his barely furnished plantation house, sipping pink grenadine—the only bottle of booze in the place—and listening to the steady, drumming downpour and dreaming of someplace dry. As a result, he had been nothing short of dumbfounded when Ian, who had said little on the return journey, suddenly turned to him and announced, “You know, Ivar, I’ve made a great decision. When we have won this blasted war, I am going to live in Jamaica. Just live in Jamaica and lap it up, and swim in the sea and write books.”

  As soon as Bryce was reestablished at Bellevue, he fulfilled the promise he had made to Fleming to help him find “the right bit of Jamaica” to buy. He scoured the beaches and byroads to no avail, until an old acquaintance told him he had just the spot. Bryce cabled “the Commander” in London saying he had found his paradise retreat, if he was still interested. Fleming’s reply came the next day: “PRAY PAUSE NOT IAN.” Several months later Fleming flew out to take a look at the land. It was a fourteen-acre plot high above the water on the north shore at Orcabessa, down the coast from Bellevue, in an area the locals called Racehorse because of an old donkey track that had been there for more years than anyone could remember. The seaward view was lovely, with an aquamarine bay, a protected harbor, and a small sliver of sand that served as a private beach. Fleming loved it and decided after some debate to call the place Goldeneye after the code name of a SIS operation he had helped plan in occupied France. He paid two thousand pounds for the property and spent the next few months sketching the design of the house he planned to build, on blotters in his Admiralty office in London.

  In November, Fleming was released from His Majesty’s service and took a job as a journalist. He had toyed briefly with the idea of returning to his former career in banking, but after seven years in intelligence it struck him as depressingly humdrum. Instead, he accepted an offer from the British press baron Lord Kemsley, whom he had gotten to know well during the war, to start a foreign news service for his chain of newspapers. Kemsley, a friend of Stephenson’s, owned by far the largest newspaper empire in England, including the prestigious Sunday Times. The salary was more than generous, and Fleming somehow managed to have it written into his contract that he was guaranteed two months’ paid vacation a year, which meant he could regularly slip away to his new house in Jamaica.

  Ogilvy was offered a job with the peacetime MI6 that he politely declined. He was a capitalist at heart and still had it in mind to make some serious money. It had occurred to him that the BSC’s wartime network of talented British, American, and Canadian businessmen should not go to waste, and on a whim he wrote up a prospectus in which his “colleagues in economic warfare could be converted into a profitable company of merchant adventurers.” Stephenson was impressed, and the new company of merchant adventurers. the World Commerce Corp., was formed, with many leading figures from the intelligence community signing on as shareholders, including General Donovan, David Bruce, and Charles Hambro. John Pepper, the prime mover in all the BSC’s economic and industrial subversion, was president. Ed Stettinius Jr., the former secretary of state, signed on as a director. Ogilvy, who was vice president of the new company, lasted in the job for only a few weeks before becoming bored. He resigned and headed for greener pastures, plunking down $23,500 for a hundred-acre tobacco farm in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, in the heart of Amish country.

  The new company flourished without him. With help from Hambro’s bank, Stephenson and his ex-intelligence cohorts quickly raised $1 million in capital, which they stated was to “help bridge over the breakdown in foreign exchange.” Their plan was to export American know-how and capital to other countries and to help develop untapped resources. One of their first big deals was in Jamaica, which was rich in gypsum and limestone but had no cement plant, forcing them to import it from England at great expense. Stephenson, who was already on good terms with the local government, negotiated a nineteen-year monopoly on Jamaican cement, and the company began making plans to build a large industrial plant at Kingston harbor. He bought one of the finest homes on the island, called Hillowtown, overlooking Montego Bay, and turned his back on Washington and the world of secret intelligence. It was an odd sort of semiexile for the powerful spymaster, who was not yet fifty. He invited Dahl, his admiring subordinate, to visit, and Dahl promised that he would.

  When all was said and done, however, Dahl could not help thinking it was an unfitting end for a man of Stephenson’s remarkable ability. “The sad thing was that when the war finished, they didn’t put him straight in the British cabinet,” he said many years later. “To me, this was an absolute tragedy.” He supposed that while Churchill knew all that the BSC chief had contributed to the war effort, he must also have recognized that Stephenson was not cut out for government work. Stephenson was too clever by half and would have run rings around the new prime minister and other cabinet members. It was probably also the case that he had alienated too many people along the way and would have undoubtedly been given “a very rough ride” had his name ever been put forward. “Although Bill had tremendous political sense, he wasn’t a political animal,” reflected Dahl. “I think they were frightened that he would have been a terrible nuisance to them in one way or another.”

  As the war receded from the front pages and dimmed in people’s memories, Stephenson’s former recruits could not help noticing an increased tendency on the part of many people, even the “otherwise well-informed,” to think anyone connected with black propaganda and special operations could not have been “quite nice,” in the words of Bickham Sweet-Escott. “Some,” he recalled, went “a great deal farther, and will tell you that the SOE was a racket, peopled by wrongheaded and irresponsible young men, by embusques or by crypto-communists, if not by out-and-out traitors.” Given half a chance, they would add that all their undercover actions had not only failed to produce “any results worth speaking about” but had made life “immeasurably more difficult” for their country now that the war was over. Inevitably, this fashionable view took hold and was expressed everywhere from Georgetown soirées to Mayfair dinner parties. In peacetime, intelligence work—eavesdropping and peering over people’s shoulders—seemed ruthless and dishonest. No one seemed to remember that this villainy was practiced for their collective security; the buggers, forgers, safe-busters, document thieves, information-sifters, and propagandists had all been on the side of the angels. Small wonder that Dahl and his BSC colleagues, who had all been in the game, were increasingly circumspect about discussing their “diplomatic” service. There was no place for espionage in polite society.

  Dahl’s wartime duties also came to an end that fall. He was mustered out of the RAF, and amateur that he was, there was no chance of a position with any postwar agency. He was spending most of his time in New York and was working temporarily out of the BSC offices at 630 Rockefeller Plaza, Room 3553. When he was in town, he stayed in Millicent Rogers’ “luxurious apartment” in Sutton Place, which had windows overlooking the East River and was very gr
and and full of marvelous Biedermeier furniture. He usually had the place to himself as she was often away.

  He, too, would soon be leaving, striking out on his own. At that moment, however, the future looked very uncertain. As blithe and unconcerned as he pretended to be, Dahl was not at all confident of his chosen career as a writer. The occasional checks he pocketed from The Saturday Evening Post and other American magazines had been a welcome supplement to his regular salary, but he wondered how he would ever manage to support himself writing full-time. At the same time, Forester’s early praise, and the popularity of his first efforts, had nurtured his ego and ambitions. Thanks in large part to Marsh, he had also come to enjoy an extravagant lifestyle, influential friends, and all the beautiful things money can buy, from expensive paintings to expensive women. For an unemployed twenty-nine-year-old, reconciling these seemingly disparate elements of his life was not easy. Instead of being able to kick up his heels and bask in those first heady days of freedom, Dahl felt the weight of expectations bearing down on him.

  He drove four hundred frozen miles from New York to Virginia to spend Christmas with Marsh as usual. His castle, Longlea, was now in the queen’s possession, so Charles had bought a new farm in Rappahannock County called Jessamine Hill, not too far down the road from his old place. He had also moved out of the R Street house in Washington, and relocated to somewhat smaller digs at 1711 22nd Street. They spent most of the holiday talking about their future plans. Marsh, whose riches had been greatly reduced by his divorce, was planning to make another fortune in newspapers. He had taken back control of his company, General Newspapers, and was already casually assembling another mini-empire. Making money came to him as naturally as breathing and was seemingly just as effortless. Dahl, who was very much concerned with his own prospects, talked about his determination to write a novel. Too many of the New York publishing types Marsh had introduced him to had advised him that there was no market for short stories. They all said books were the thing, so he would just have to have a go at it. The legendary Maxwell Perkins, Hemingway’s editor at Scribner’s, had agreed to take him on and offered him a contract for his first foray into long-form fiction. Hoping to capitalize on his early success, or perhaps just hedging his bets a little, the story Dahl had in mind was an adult fantasy that once again featured that tiny scourge of the RAF and was tentatively entitled The Gremlins.