The Irregulars (34 page)

After two and a half weeks flat on his back, Dahl was able to leave the hospital and moved into Dr. Scott’s house for the remainder of his stay. As soon as he was able to sit up again, he began working on new short stories and “wrote like a madman.” In the last few months, he had managed to sell several more short stories to magazines and was hoping to have enough for a book. Curtice Hitchcock had sent him a letter stating that his firm, Reynal & Hitchcock, would be interested in publishing the collection.

In early February, Dahl was called back to Washington on “urgent business” that he could not divulge, but as soon as it was taken care of, he retreated to Marsh’s house in Virginia to continue his recuperation. With both Marsh and Alice away, there was no one at Longlea besides Marsh’s two young children, who had been left in the care of the household servants, so he was more or less on his own, living “in solitary opulence.” With its breathtaking view of the Blue Ridge Mountains, it was an ideal setting in which to rest and regain his strength. His recovery was taking rather longer than he expected, and he still could not bend down to tie his shoes. But he had his writing to occupy him and still had a great deal to do, including reworking “A Piece of Cake” and several earlier stories to include in his short story collection. He dashed off a note to his mother filling her in on his progress and suggested she phone Stephenson, “my boss,” who was in London, to get “all the news.”

By early March, Dahl had taken a turn for the worse and was feeling sufficiently unwell to worry Dr. Scott. On his advice, Dahl caught an RAF plane back to Texas and returned to the clinic for further examination. Scott immediately diagnosed the problem and scheduled Dahl for a small secondary operation to remove a substance from his spine that had been injected back in January to enable them to take X-rays. Dahl spent a week in traction and then moved back into Dr. Scott’s house. He was soon up and about and feeling much better and wrote his mother that he was confident that the last procedure “did the trick” and he was finally cured.

During his absence, Marsh kept Dahl abreast of matters of diplomatic and domestic consequence and on March 7 sent him a letter alerting him that the personal press spokesman for Representative Clare Luce had “privately communicated” that she would be making a speech upon her return from her travels from the Middle East and that she hoped that the wing commander would be present. Addressing Dahl as “My Dear Lord,” Marsh continued:

Naturally the people concerned with air routes and oil are educating her. It has been suggested that she confine her remarks to love in order to be accurate in her standard role as a Narcissus actor.

Attached are a few of the highlights of her speech on love from the Orient to the Occident, from the front to the back, from the head to the foot, on the axis of thought. The attached speech is not in her exact language, but is provocative and suggestive of what might be said by this lady Congresswoman to all these men in Congress who will hear her.

 

Dahl had been back in Washington less than a week when he learned of the president’s death from a massive cerebral hemorrhage on the afternoon of April 12. It was just as his superiors had feared—Roosevelt had died in office, and his vice president would be imposed on a grieving nation. Only it would be Truman, not Wallace. All the old American warhorses were dropping in their tracks. Pa Watson, a member of FDR’s inner circle, had passed away during the return trip from the Yalta conference. Hull had heart problems and had retired. Hopkins was in and out of the hospital. Soon there would be a complete changing of the guard, and Churchill might have trouble finding a friendly face among the country’s new leadership. It was unlikely that Truman, whom Marsh categorized as a man of “small brain and great ambition” and wholly ignorant of foreign affairs, would be as kindly disposed toward Great Britain as his predecessor. Roosevelt would be missed by the English at least as much as by his own people, maybe more.

On April 14 Dahl debriefed Pearson on Truman’s first cabinet meeting, held just before he was sworn in—which the columnist had directly from a cabinet member—and filed the following intelligence report with the BSC:

He [Truman] said he wanted them all to continue serving. Stettinius said he would be glad to…. Stimson said he was a soldier and would serve so long as the war lasted…. Mrs Perkins started weeping…. Truman lunched with Senators on the Hill yesterday; they all endeavored to persuade him to make following changes in his staff…Byrnes Secretary of State…remove Madame Perkins as Secretary of Labor…decision already taken make Spruille Braden Ambassador to Argentine…. You should know that conversations are going on at present between Army, Navy, State Department and Department of Interior re Roosevelt’s proposal make conquered Jap islands in Pacific trusteeships. This…one of the first problems confronting Truman….

 

Later that day Dahl was stricken with acute appendicitis and underwent emergency surgery. Marsh wired his family in England that Roald was doing fine and that hopefully this would be “the last of his troubles.” On a more reassuring note, he explained that before this last hiccup, Dahl’s back was almost completely better and that he had been getting ready to play tennis, adding drolly, “I am so very happy to report that I believe your son is going to be a normal physical young man before the year is over.”

When Dahl finally limped out of the hospital, Marsh installed him in the R Street house, where Claudia Haines, his “perennially efficient secretary,” as she wryly referred to herself, nursed him back to health. Claudia doted on Dahl, and treated him like a second son. Moreover, her own nineteen-year-old son, Davis, and twenty-one-year-old daughter, known as young Claudia, had become extremely close to him over the past three years. Young Claudia, who had always worshipped the handsome pilot, waited on him hand and foot. In the past year, she had blossomed into an exceedingly attractive young woman, with shiny dark hair, a well-developed figure, and a sultry air that Charles always said gave her the exotic looks of “a Hawaiian princess.” Young Claudia was sweet and affectionate, and Dahl soon convinced himself that he was in love, and he surprised them both by proposing. Despite having an enormous crush on Dahl, she knew him to be a tireless bird dog and, as Antoinette recalled, “quite sensibly turned him down.”

D
AHL HAD BEEN
working for the BSC for what seemed to him like “quite a long time” without ever meeting the big chief. By his own estimate, it had been over a year and a half since his first contact with Stephenson’s agents and the beginning of his work along counterespionage lines. Now that he had formally joined the outfit and was considered a staff member as opposed to just another freelance agent, it seems he was finally being honored with a summons to the New York headquarters. He already knew, of course, that the large suite of offices the spy chief had chosen for the nucleus of his American operation occupied the thirty-fifth and thirty-sixth floors of a New York skyscraper, but he was not prepared for the black marble grandeur of Rockefeller Center or the dizzying speed of the state-of-the-art elevators, which, he later recalled, moved “faster than I have ever dived in any aeroplane.” Over the years, the office had functioned under a variety of covers, from the United Kingdom Commercial Corporation and British Purchasing Commission to the British Library of Information. At the moment, the small plaque by the door indicated that he had arrived at the British Passport Control Office.

Dahl could not help feeling just a little bit nervous at penetrating the much-vaunted veil of secrecy that separated the secret world from regular society—the “insiders” from the “outsiders.” At the same time, he was unaccountably pleased that he had made it through an arduous trial period without raising any red flags and was about to be invited into an elite corps. As he was led through the bustling premises, he could not help noticing the many comely young women, a pool of fifty or more Canadian secretaries whom, rumor had it, the BSC chief personally recruited and swore to secrecy. When he was finally ushered into Stephenson’s large office and the man behind the desk rose to greet him, Dahl received “quite a shock.” The legendary director of the BSC was surprisingly diminutive—all the more so from Dahl’s perspective of six feet six inches. “The first impression of Stephenson was a small man of immense power, nothing indecisive about him at all,” he recalled. “I liked him instantly. There was bound to be at first trepidation and fear because you were right in the lion’s den.”

Everything about Stephenson was compact and efficient. He was a slim, brisk man in his late forties, with the springy step of a boxer, cropped graying hair, and a pair of penetrating eyes. Unlike most short men, Dahl noticed that Stephenson never raised his head in order to meet his gaze but instead kept his chin tucked in so that “only his eyes, which were very, very pale, looked up at you.” He was dressed in plain clothes, lit his next cigarette from the one still planted in the corner of his mouth, and talked in short, clipped sentences. He could speak with authority about science, economics, and politics and in the next breath expertly lay out the latest technology for secret coding and surveillance, seamlessly switching from one subject to the other with the ease of someone adjusting the wireless. What was most striking about him was his imperturbable calm, an aura of absolute control that allowed him to offer only the occasional comment while eliciting from others a flood of nervous chatter, a talent that prompted Robert Sherwood to dub him the “quiet Canadian,” a moniker that stuck with him throughout the war. “He never raised his voice, ever,” recalled Dahl. “He had this extraordinary quality. You knew that in that head of his, as he was listening to you and watching you, something was ticking about twice as fast as it was in your head, and every facet and angle was being weighed up, and then one question would come out which would just about cover the whole lot, and you would answer it.”

It was typical of his temperment that he insisted on taking part in Operation Overload. On D-day, Stephenson, who would not be denied a front-row seat, had flown as a rear gunner over the Normandy coast. The old World War One fighter pilot had not lost his appetite for battle. He was disappointed not to have cornered a German in his crosshairs but was immensely proud to have been part of the greatest invasion force in history. It was a longing for action that Dahl understood and frankly admired, but no longer felt himself.

It was ironic that by the time Dahl started seeing a lot of Stephenson and learning firsthand the details of his masterful clandestine role, his far-reaching counterespionage apparatus was already in the process of being dismantled. The BSC had done what it set out to do—push America toward intervention and secure the defeat of the Nazis—and now, with the war drawing to a close, it was no longer needed. Their covert operation had been of inestimable value, but as is usually the case in espionage on foreign soil, gratitude was in short supply. Most of what the BSC had done within the United States could not be publicly acknowledged, and Stephenson’s cavalier disregard for the law of the land had long outraged the head of the FBI and senior State Department officials, who could not wait to clip his wings. During his five years in Washington he had been far too vigorous and independent, and the new generation ascending to power, both in America and England, favored executives who could be counted on more for their restraint than for their initiative. Stephenson, whose strength lay in his intuitive grasp of politics, could feel the tide in Washington turning against him.

While he was by no means ready to relinquish his power and probably felt he still had a firm hold on the situation, he knew the awarding of laurels always signaled that a warrior was near the end of his run. He had received the knighthood in January, his name included in the New Year’s honors list. He was more proud of the comment, written in Churchill’s signature green ink, next to his name on the list of candidates being recommended to King George VI. It read: “This one is dear to my heart.” He was later awarded the Medal for Merit by President Truman, the first foreigner to receive the honor from the United States government.

If Stephenson had been content to retire then and fade into the sunset, it probably would have been better. But it never happened that way. A particular hazard facing secret service officials was paranoia—the toxic by-product of their profession. It went way beyond the normal fear of being eclipsed. They never trust their successors not to do them in, and Sir William was no exception. He suspected that his rivals within the service would inevitably seek to rewrite history, taking credit for his accomplishments and reapportioning the blame. With this in mind, he moved to secure his legacy and commissioned a history of the BSC’s wartime achievements. As in the past, he banked on this “official” record of his agency’s activities to protect him against future criticism. He assigned the task to one of his brightest subordinates, Gilbert Highet, the brains behind their political counterpropaganda activities in Latin America. A classics professor in his prewar life, he seemed ideally suited to cataloging the BSC’s triumphs. Highet had begun work on the project early in the spring of 1945, but in mid-June, after rejecting an early draft as less than satisfactory, Stephenson called for reinforcements.

The first Dahl heard of this new assignment was an unequivocal request from the chief himself. He wanted the acclaimed young writer to apply his storytelling skills to render the material a little more palatable than Highet’s dry, academic text. Stephenson reportedly had something considerably more dramatic in mind and expected them to somehow condense the hundreds of thousands of wartime documents into a colorful, compelling narrative. He had already tapped another BSC staffer by the name of Thomas H. Hill. A journalist by training, Hill had edited trade publications in Canada and had been drafted by the BSC to edit the
Western Hemisphere Weekly Bulletin
, a sort of in-house organ that trumpeted the BSC’s unclassified successes in various countries and made the case for their importance to SIS in London.

Stephenson also brought in an editor named Giles Playfair, the son of actor-producer Sir Nigel Playfair, who had been a radio journalist for the Malaysian Broadcasting Company. Playfair had escaped during the fall of Singapore and had written an exciting eyewitness account of the Japanese invasion entitled
Singapore Goes Off the Air.
He had subsequently been recruited by the BSC and worked on counterespionage in the New York office. Stephenson thought he was just the man to punch up the copy. As soon as each chapter was finished, it was handed off to Playfair for a final polish before being submitted to Stephenson for approval. To this odd assortment of talents, Stephenson added two of his Canadian secretaries, Grace Garner and Eleanor Fleming, who had worked for him for most of the war. The head of his filing section, Merle Cameron, rounded out the team.

Dahl was amazed at the extraordinarily elaborate security precautions Stephenson ordered to safeguard his secret history. He insisted that all the work be done at their isolated Camp X site, on the northern shore of Lake Ontario, where he could guarantee that both his papers and personnel were protected. “The thing I always remember,” said Dahl, “was how Bill had all these archives sent up from New York in some sort of wonderful security truck with an escort.” The operation was vintage Stephenson, taking place under the cover of darkness, with the armed guards stealthily transferring hundreds of cartons of files into trucks waiting outside Rockefeller Plaza sometime after midnight. Ten hours later, a Canadian army captain handed the border guards his name and code number, and the convoy was waved across the border into Canada, where it proceeded to the Oshawa training facility. Stephenson had already been using some of the school’s outbuildings as cold storage for some BSC records, so in his mind it was a logical place to set up shop.

Having only just returned to Washington, Dahl did not relish spending the summer in the Canadian wilderness, surrounded by flat, gray scrub brush and marshlands. He quickly grew bored in the cloistered environs of Oshawa and Whitby, where a night out consisted of dinner at the Genosha Hotel. The job of cataloging the BSC’s myriad operations proved laborious and dull, and in his own words, he “copped out” and left the majority of the work to Hill. Whenever possible, he sneaked back to New York for a few days, always on the pretext of business.

In early July, Dahl dashed off a quick note to Claudia, making no reference to his mysterious work and furnishing no details of his whereabouts beyond a post office box in Toronto. He reported that he was working too hard to do any writing of his own, but that he hoped to be finished by the end of August. Adding to his impatience to be off was that Hitchcock had accepted ten stories based on his combat experiences in the RAF and would be publishing them in a collection to be entitled
Over to You
. The book was already in galleys, and fairly crowing with excitement, Dahl told Marsh that as the “official go-between” between himself and his literary editor, he should be the first to hear the news, and he proudly enclosed copies of the advertising pulls that were soon to appear in the
Times Literary Supplement
.

After complaining of a dearth of letters from R Street during his exile in Canada, Dahl received his due the following week. Marsh wrote that he had spent the previous ten days in New York and that Dahl had been in his thoughts much of the time, as he was involved in work “which you would have so very much enjoyed being around.” He referred obliquely to a meeting at the Hay Adams, where he finally worked out a divorce settlement that, at long last, “may help the flickering light of a liberal life.”
*

Just as he had earlier vowed, Marsh had freed himself of both Glass sisters: Alice got Longlea and a large cut of his net worth; Mary Louise, who reportedly quit in a fit of pique over a rude comment of Charles’, eventually married Wallace’s assistant, Harold Young. Marsh made it clear in his own distinctive way that Claudia was graduating from secretary to mistress, at one point even stopping to acknowledge the lady faithfully taking down his every word: “She is a martinet, she is a cruel and decisive woman, we all look for them, don’t we?” Instructing Dahl that he should henceforth write to her at a separate address—for the sake of propriety, she insisted on having her own place until they could be married—Marsh added: “Claudia is too conceited to call herself your Mother. She will settle on the Aunt position. But I strongly suspect that she wants to be more than a big sister. No woman will settle for anything less than being a woman.”

By late summer, Hill, Dahl, and Playfair had completed a five-hundred-page manuscript. Stephenson, who was obsessed with safeguarding the manuscript, contracted a small Oshawa printing company, located four miles from the camp, to do the job, but not before the place was carefully vetted by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. “It became quite a little feat of logistics,” recalled Hill, describing how they proofread the galley pages by day and then at night would take the typescript back to the printer’s under armed guard, shuttling back and forth in military vehicles. The entire print run was restricted to twenty copies, and as soon as the last set of signatures was boxed and sealed, they were taken directly to a bookbinder in Toronto. Stephenson had arranged for each leather-bound volume to be carefully placed in an individual locked box of his own design. Believing the original records too sensitive to risk preserving—particularly the details of British intelligence’s activities prior to America’s entry into the war, during a period of neutrality, which if ever made public would seriously damage Anglo-American relations—he ordered Hill and his wife to burn the lot. Thousands of tons of BSC documents were heaped into a homemade concrete furnace at the camp, specially outfitted with grate to prevent any partially charred pages from escaping, and went up in flames.

Needless to say, Dahl did not get to take home a sample of his handiwork. Stephenson personally took charge of all twenty volumes of the official history, which was referred to from then on as “the bible” but which he gave the riveting title,
British Security Coordination (BSC): An Account of Secret Activities in the Western Hemisphere, 1940–45.
It was understood that he would be keeping two for himself, and distributing copies to Roosevelt, Churchill, and “C,” along with a handful of other high officials in the SIS and SOE in London. The remaining ten were reportedly locked in a bank vault in Montreal.
*