Special relationship: the British spies who slept their way through Washington during World War II.

• Author: Peterson, Britt
• Position: The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington - Book review

The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington

by Jennet Conant

Simon & Schuster, 416 pp.

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When Winston Churchill described, in 1946, the "special relationship" between the United States and Great Britain, he was eliding a few inconvenient details. Much has been written about American isolationism before the war--Charles Lindbergh, America Firsters, "Let God Save the King," and so on. But even after Pearl Harbor, as Jennet Conant describes in her mostly entertaining new book, The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington, "a certain amount of ambivalence, if not residual anti-British sentiment," still prevailed. Working avidly to conquer it was the British Security Coordination (BSC), an underground network of British spies and propagandists operating out of Rockefeller Center under the direction of William "Intrepid" Stephenson. The BSC's agents included, famously, Ian Fleming and Noel Coward, and, less famously, Roald Dahl, the author of classic children's books such as Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

The BSC had been formed in 1940 to do all that "could not be done by overt means, to assure sufficient aid for Britain and eventually to bring America into the war," as the official BSC history puts it. This included intelligence gathering in North America and ploys to garner American popular support, ranging from the subtle to the wildly unorthodox. One famous BSC gambit involved the hiring of Hungarian astrologer Louis de Wohl to predict Hitler's downfall; Stephenson, a valiant and crafty superspy, even arranged for one of de Wohl's more minor predictions--that an ally of Hitler's would go insane--to come true for added verisimilitude. (The implausibility of this trick may have reflected, more than anything, certain assumptions about the American public's gullibility: "It is unlikely," the BSC history explains, "that any propagandist would seriously attempt to influence politically the people of England, say, or France through the medium of astrological prediction. Yet in the United States this was done with effective if limited results.") It has been reported that at its peak, the BSC employed three thousand agents within the U.S.

After Pearl Harbor and America's entrance into the war in 1942, the BSC's role altered. Instead of trying to change America's direction, the problem now was keeping it on track. In Washington, at least, this primarily...