Download The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington AudioBook Free
When Roald Dahl, a dashing young wounded RAF pilot, used his post at the Uk Embassy in Washington in 1942, his assignment was to use his good looks, wit, and appreciable charm to gain access to the most effective information in American political life. A patriot eager to do his part to save lots of his country from a Nazi invasion, he invaded the upper reaches of the U.S. authorities and Georgetown culture, earning over First Girl Eleanor Roosevelt and her spouse, Franklin; befriending wartime leaders from Henry Wallace to Henry Morgenthau; and seducing the gorgeous freshman congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce.
Dahl would soon be caught up in a complicated web of deception masterminded by William Stephenson, aka Intrepid, Churchill's famous spy key, who, with Leader Roosevelt's tacit authorization, mounted a key marketing campaign of propaganda and political subversion to weaken American isolationist causes, bring the country into the conflict against Germany, and influence U.S. coverage and only England. Known as the Uk Security Coordination (BSC) -- though the initiated preferred to think about themselves as the Baker Neighborhood Irregulars honoring the amateurs who aided Sherlock Holmes -- these audacious agencies planted British isles propaganda in American magazines and radio programs, covertly inspired leading journalists -- including Drew Pearson, Walter Winchell, and Walter Lippmann -- harassed dominant isolationists and anti-New Sellers, and plotted against American companies that did business with the Third Reich.
In an account much better than spy fiction, Jennet Conant shows Dahl progressing from hesitant diplomat to sly man-about-town, parlaying his morale-boosting wartime propaganda work into an effective profession as an publisher, which causes his entrée into the Roosevelt White House and Hyde Area and initiation into British isles intelligence's elite grubby stunts squad, all in under 3 years. He and his vibrant coconspirators -- David Ogilvy, Ian Fleming, and Ivar Bryce, recruited more for his or her imagination and dramatic flair than any experience in the spy business -- gossiped, bugged, and frequently hilariously bungled their way across Washington, doing their finest to handle their cloak-and-dagger tasks, support the fledgling American intelligence company (the OSS), and discover that Roosevelt was elected for an unprecedented fourth term.
It can be an extraordinary tale of deceit, double-dealing, and moral ambiguity -- all in the name of triumph. Richly thorough and meticulously researched, Conant's persuasive narrative pulls on never-before-seen wartime letters, diaries, and interviews and provides a rare, and incredibly candid, insider's view of the counterintelligence game during the tumultuous days and nights of World Conflict II.
