The Lecherous Spy Career of Roald Dahl
Indeed, Roald Dahl, the author of the beloved children’s novels James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The BFG, and so many more, seduced dozens of American women on behalf of His Majesty’s government during the Second World War.
Born to Norwegian parents in Wales in 1916, his early years were marred by tragedy, losing his sister and then his father of appendicitis and pneumonia, respectively, within just weeks of each other in 1920. Four years later he was sent to live and study at the Cathedral School in Llandaf, Wales, where he was frequently abused by its cane swinging headmaster. The English boarding schools he attended in his later boyhood years were no better, so the prospect of four more years of higher education were not at all appealing to him. So, after turning 18, rather than attend university, Dahl instead packed up and left Europe behind altogether. After a short stay in Newfoundland, Canada, he moved to faraway Dar-Es-Salaam in modern Tanzania, where, for the next couple years, he worked as a low level employee for the Shell Oil company, helping to deliver shipments to clients across what was then called Tanganyika Territory.
With war very obviously looming in the early months of 1939, the then-23-year-old Dahl quit his job and enlisted in the Royal Air Force (RAF) in hopes of becoming a fighter pilot. After finishing up basic training, he was assigned to No. 80 Squadron, then stationed in British Egypt, just about 2,300 miles north of his former home in Tanzania. Unfortunately, his flying days ended up being short lived.
On September 19, 1940, during a training mission aboard an antiquated and soon-to-be-obsolete Gladiator biplane, Dahl drifted off course, eventually ran out of fuel, and was forced to make a rough crash landing in the Libyan desert that left him with a fractured skull. Despite also suffering from temporary blindness, he somehow managed to drag himself away from the wreck and survive, albeit unconscious, long enough to be rescued by an allied search party later that night.
Here’s the link to today’s Daily game:
After 6 months of rest and treatment in an Alexandria military hospital, he was again cleared for duty and sent to rejoin his old unit, Squadron No. 80, at the emerging front in Greece. A remarkable recovery. Unfortunately (again), the aftereffects of his injuries, specifically headaches and frequent blackouts, made it impossible for him to continue his career as a fighter pilot. He was permanently grounded in the summer of 1941, and soon after sent back to England.
He’d bounce back, though. About a year after returning home to the UK, he was assigned to work as an assistant air attaché at the British embassy in Washington DC, primarily to handle PR for the RAF. His unstated directive, however, was to be, essentially, a propagandist.
In July of 1942 he was approached by a representative of the British Ministry of Information and asked to write an account of his harrowing crash in the Sahara as part of a PR campaign to raise awareness about the war in Africa. Rather than write it like a press release, though, Dahl instead wrote it like a short story. The piece, heavily embellished though it was, ended up turning out so well that the representative, celebrated English novelist C.S. Forester, pulled some strings and got it published in the Saturday Evening Post. ‘Shot Down Over Libya,’ it was called, and it became a major sensation after it ran on August 1, 1942.
Its notoriety, combined with his natural charm and charisma quickly earned him a place among the DC elite, and that in turn made him a very attractive target for Mi6, who approached him sometime in the summer of 1942 through an intermediary organization called the British Security Coordination, or BSC. It was run out of an office at 30 Rock in New York by Canadian businessman William Stephenson, who ended up being knighted after the war for his role in putting the network together.
Their primary goal was essentially the same as Dahl’s: to influence American public opinion about the war. Once he signed on, they provided him with a clear directive to that end: build relationships with the DC aristocracy, by whatever means necessary, and work on their hearts and minds.
Meanwhile, he continued writing, and it only served to make him an even more effective asset.
In 1943, almost a year after ‘Shot Down Over Libya’ debuted, he published his first children’s novel, The Gremlins, to massively critical acclaim. It gave him almost celebrity status among the DC aristocracy, and, crucially, won him the admiration of Eleanor Roosevelt, who later told him she read it to her grandchildren. Walt Disney himself would personally negotiate a deal to buy its film rights.
Irreconcilable creative differences ultimately soured Dahl’s relationship with Disney, who never ended up making the movie, but his friendship with the Roosevelt’s only got stronger with time. He even took a vacation with the First Family in Hyde Park in the summer of 1943, during which time he catalogued just about everything they said and did, unbeknownst to them, and reported it to his superiors in Britain.
From there, his story gets a lot more… adult. Through his connections to some of DC’s most influential politicians, including Vice President Henry Wallace (with whom he played tennis) and then-Senator Harry Truman (with whom he played poker), Dahl made the acquaintance of the city’s most notable private citizens, and their wives. At the direct request of his bosses at the BSC, he struck up passionate, well-documented affairs with dozens of them, most notably Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers, the mononymic French actress Annabella, and Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce, who was married to Time magazine founder Henry Luce.
Luce was likely the most prized of his many mistresses, at least from BSC’s point of view, because of her connection to one of the country’s most prominent anti-war isolationists, and one of its most influential media moguls (he also owned Life and Fortune). Whether or not Roald actually succeeded in changing her mind about matters of war and peace is lost to history, but his feelings about the assignment are most certainly not. Their relationship eventually became so intense, and so physically demanding that, so the story goes, he famously asked his superiors to be reassigned, writing in one report to the BSC:
‘I am all f****d out! That g****** woman has absolutely screwed me from one end of the room to the other for three g****** nights!’ 1
After the war he returned home to England, cut ties with Mi6, married American actress Patricia Neal, had a couple kids, and began pursuing his writing career. His first major success came in 1961 with the publication of his first full length children’s novel since The Gremlins: James and the Giant Peach. Then came Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) and The Magic Finger (1966), both of which were also big hits in their day.
He’d peripherally return to the world of international espionage in 1967 when he helped to adapt a bestselling novel of another of former BSC’s golden boys, Ian Fleming. James Bond isn’t based on any one singular person, so his creator said, but his personality and his way with women unambiguously mirrors those of Roald Dahl, who was a colleague of Fleming’s during the war years. His influence on the character may perhaps have been the reason Fleming asked him to write the screenplay for the very, very sensual Bond film You Only Live Twice, which has about as much, let’s say, adult content as any of the 25 they’ve made to this point. Just take a look at the poster for it. The influence of its writer is clearly felt.
He’d later go on to adapt another of Fleming’s novels the very next year: Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. He also wrote the scripts for The Night Digger (1971) and the original adaptation of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (also 1971).
Even after this very public collaboration with known spy Ian Fleming, his own connections to Mi6 weren’t made public knowledge until after his death, when a wave of biographies about him were published in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
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