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The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington |  | Author: Jennet Conant
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
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Seller: GLOBAL-BOOKS
Rating:  64 reviews
Sales Rank: 530611
Media: Paperback
Pages: 416
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.5 x 1.1
ISBN: 0743294599
Dewey Decimal Number: 940.5486410973
EAN: 9780743294591
ASIN: 0743294599
Publication Date: September 8, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, September 2008: Long before Willy Wonka sent out those five Golden Tickets, Roald Dahl lived a life that was more James Bond than James and the Giant Peach. After blinding headaches cut short his distinguished career as a Royal Air Force fighter pilot, Dahl became part of an elite group of British spies working against the United States' neutrality at the onset of World War II. The Irregulars is a brilliant profile of Dahl's lesser-known profession, embracing a real-life storyline of suave debauchery, clandestine motives, and afternoon cocktails. If this sounds oddly familiar, it's no coincidence: both Ian Fleming (the creator of 007) and Bill Stephenson (the legendary spymaster rumored to be the inspiration for Bond) were members of the same outfit. Although "Dahl...Roald Dahl" doesn't quite carry the same debonair ring, there is no discrediting this fascinating look at the British author's covert service to the Allied cause during WWII. --Dave Callanan
Product Description
When Roald Dahl, a dashing young wounded RAF pilot, took up his post at the British Embassy in Washington in 1942, his assignment was to use his good looks, wit, and considerable charm to gain access to the most powerful figures in American political life. A patriot eager to do his part to save his country from a Nazi invasion, he invaded the upper reaches of the U.S. government and Georgetown society, winning over First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and her husband, Franklin; befriending wartime leaders from Henry Wallace to Henry Morgenthau; and seducing the glamorous freshman congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce. Dahl would soon be caught up in a complex web of deception masterminded by William Stephenson, aka Intrepid, Churchill's legendary spy chief, who, with President Roosevelt's tacit permission, mounted a secret campaign of propaganda and political subversion to weaken American isolationist forces, bring the country into the war against Germany, and influence U.S. policy in favor of England. Known as the British Security Coordination (BSC) -- though the initiated preferred to think of themselves as the Baker Street Irregulars in honor of the amateurs who aided Sherlock Holmes -- these audacious agents planted British propaganda in American newspapers and radio programs, covertly influenced leading journalists -- including Drew Pearson, Walter Winchell, and Walter Lippmann -- harassed prominent isolationists and anti-New Dealers, and plotted against American corporations that did business with the Third Reich. In an account better than spy fiction, Jennet Conant shows Dahl progressing from reluctant diplomat to sly man-about-town, parlaying his morale-boosting wartime propaganda work into a successful career as an author, which leads to his entrée into the Roosevelt White House and Hyde Park and initiation into British intelligence's elite dirty tricks squad, all in less than three years. He and his colorful coconspirators -- David Ogilvy, Ian Fleming, and Ivar Bryce, recruited more for their imagination and dramatic flair than any experience in the spy business -- gossiped, bugged, and often hilariously bungled their way across Washington, doing their best to carry out their cloak-and-dagger assignments, support the fledgling American intelligence agency (the OSS), and see that Roosevelt was elected to an unprecedented fourth term. It is an extraordinary tale of deceit, double-dealing, and moral ambiguity -- all in the name of victory. Richly detailed and meticulously researched, Conant's compelling narrative draws on never-before-seen wartime letters, diaries, and interviews and provides a rare, and remarkably candid, insider's view of the counterintelligence game during the tumultuous days of World War II.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 64
 Well, Irregular June 11, 2010
Piperboy Wannabe (Baltimore, MD, United States, North America, Earth)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I found this book to be somewhat tedious. Roald Dahl seems to go from one "affair" to another. Both Churchill and FDR seem to be trying to use him for their own ends. He seems to have found a way to "do his patriotic duty" by flipping from one bed or party to the next. Heck of a way to spend the war.
I never found myself sufficiently engaged to "like" the title character. (I've read other books about really rotten people who, I'm ashamed to say but credit the author, I somewhat "liked" by the end of the book. This is not one of those books.) After the first hundred pages, I really had to force myself to continue.
There is some good background information. If the reader had never been exposed to the "chess game" Winnie and FDR were playing with each other, he'd learn something of it here. I already knew that LBJ was a womanizing scoundrel, but it was nice to see it confirmed.
If you enjoy gossip columns, I suppose you'll like this. I don't/didn't.
 Roald Dahl before the children's books June 7, 2010
GrannyBooks (Frankfort, OH USA)
If you have kids or grandkids you probably know Roald Dahl as the writer of children's books. Among his best known are James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Matilda, all of which have been made into movies of varying quality. The books, however, all hold to a high standard.
But this book is not about Roald Dahl, the writer of children's books and silly poems. This is about Roald Dahl before he found that talent within himself. In WWII, after he was invalided out of the RAF, he was assigned to the British Embassy in Washington, D.C., where he was recruited by British Intelligence to spy on the U.S.
Did you think all the spies in the U.S. during WWII were German or Japanese or Italian? Well, they weren't. Britain was concerned that the U.S. would wait the war out -- sentiment was strong in the U.S. to stay out of the war. Churchill wanted to know who in our government supported helping England and who didn't. So a group of "friendly" spies, Dahl among them, gathered information that was forwarded to England.
It is an interesting account of Washington during WWII from a perspective seldom encountered. I enjoyed it both as history and as a side I didn't know of an author I have long appreciated.
No Spark May 18, 2010
Michael DENNISUK (trenton, michigan USA)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I trudged through 100 pages or so of this book and could not finish it. Books of this genre that work the best give you a great sense of time and place. This book did not do that for me. There were too many characterswith to little meaning.
 "Unreliable Narrators" January 20, 2010
F. S. L'hoir (Irvine, CA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The subject of this interesting book, which I read through to the end, is ostensibly espionage. The spies though, which included not only Dahl but also Ian Fleming and Noel Coward, flit through the narrative rather like moths in the background. Because their activities are only dimly lit (and none of them gets close enough to the flame to be burned), one gets only occasional glimpses of the precise nature of what they actually did (which may indicate their effectiveness as spies). Dahl's own character, which seems to hover between British Schoolboy humor and Nordic angst, remains as elusive as does the account of his espionage.
The book, however, provides insight on behind-the-scenes politics of wartime Washington. I was particularly fascinated reading about those politicians whose names I remember hearing on the radio (or my parents discussing) but to which I never paid much attention as a child. It was especially interesting to read about Roosevelt at Hyde Park and the early ascent of Lyndon Johnson. It was also interesting to read that the president then had as much opposition as the president now. Things do not seem to change much in politics.
In her introduction, the author notes that "spies are notoriously unreliable narrators." Perhaps this is why the substance of the book remains elusive and the title seems misleading. I think that the book would have been more aptly titled: "Roald Dahl in Wartime Washington." Then some readers, who have criticized the book, would not have been expecting revelations about espionage that never materialize.
I would recommend this book, which is subtly footnoted (The quotes are cited by page number at the back of the book.) and has a respectable bibliography, to anyone who is interested in the Washington scene of the 1940s. Since I am a layman as far as the history of wartime Washington is concerned, I cannot comment on the reliability of the narrative, but I can say that I found it quite compelling.
 Once you put it down you can't pick it up January 10, 2010
Annie Van Auken (Planet Earth)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
We learn in the first third of THE IRREGULARS that self-aggrandizing professional hobnobber/gigolo Roald Dahl dallied with many an over-40 society dame in a quest for info potentially useful to his own government.
From this work we get the impression that much of D.C.'s elite were alcoholic braggarts, satyrs, over-aged nymphs and not-very-nice folks, in general who spent most of their time tearing each other down at endless, dreary cocktail parties. The average reader won't recognize any of these individuals or give a whit about them.
Later, Dahl fries bigger tuna: he ingratiates himself with first Eleanor and then Franklin Roosevelt, spending weekends with them at Hyde Park and gathering tidbits to feed to Winnie Churchill via his own superiors. But it was a strange game: FDR knew what Dahl was about and anything this fellow could learn was surely OK with the President, who undoubtedly used an opportunistic back door channel to clandestinely communicate with his British counterpart.
After slogging through a good 100 pages of obscure Washingtonians, a befuddling list almost as large as that of Tolstoy's characters in WAR AND PEACE, and not finding any of them worth remembering, then watching Dahl gleefully reporting his FDR-approved nuggets to the British equivalent of the OSS, your reviewer set this tome down, then found it impossible to pick up again.
Your disappointed history buff shouldn't have been surprised that "The Irregulars" was such a stone drag, however. When all that a snoop (OK...'operative') risks in clandestinely monitoring an ally is a party hangover or the Clap, one's attention tends to falter. Far more riveting would be the true story of a spy within the Reich itself; someone, who if caught would not see the sun rise tomorrow.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 64
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