McLean, who never received her guests without the 45 1/2 carat Hope diamond dangling from her neck, made Dahl a regular at the glamorous Sunday night dinners she presided over in her Massachusetts Avenue manor house, which featured dance orchestras, previews of first-run movies and a hundred or more guests per gathering. There was also the hostess Evalyn Walsh McLean, whose son-in-law, Senator Robert Rice Reynolds of North Carolina, had initially blamed the Pearl Harbor attack on the British who, Conant writes, now “monitored his every move.” Soon, Dahl was hobnobbing with Eleanor Roosevelt during weekends at Hyde Park, where he also met the president, allowing him to become, Conant expansively concludes, “a back-channel conduit of information” to Churchill.ĭahl befriended the publisher of the reactionary Washington Times-Herald, Eleanor (Cissie) Patterson, whom Roosevelt had denounced as a social “parasite” more interested in giving tea parties than in aiding the war effort. Marsh, who lived in a 19th-century mansion in Dupont Circle, introduced Dahl to his friends.

In Washington, where the grand parties and salons depicted in the Henry Adams novel “Democracy” lingered on, Dahl’s combat record, good looks and charm made him a prize social catch.ĭahl’s entry into Washington high-life was immeasurably smoothed by the avuncular Texas newspaper magnate and oil tycoon Charles Edward Marsh, who had moved to the capital to aid the New Deal. To the end of his life, Conant writes, Dahl demanded that his publisher dispatch a Rolls-Royce to collect manuscripts from his home. Like his chums Noël Coward and Ian Fleming, both of whom also assisted British intelligence during the war, Dahl was firmly in the tradition of the amateur gentleman-spy, and in Washington he soon acquired a taste for a lavish lifestyle that he never lost. hero, parachuted himself into Washington blue-blood circles in 1942 and used his embassy post to begin spying on Britain’s closest and most important ally. Conant, who has written popular accounts of the secret development of radar and the atomic bomb, shows that Dahl, a former R.A.F. But as Jennet Conant reports in “The Irregulars,” he was also a British spy.

Roald Dahl is famous for his mischievous children’s stories.

The irregulars by jennet conant