The art of spying on your friends

The Irregulars By Jennet Conant. Photo / Supplied

For New Zealanders, where the memory of the Rainbow Warrior remains charged with emotion, the idea of covert operations directed against "friendly" nations is familiar. But Americans tend to think of espionage as being mainly targeted towards national enemies or potential foes.

The thought of allies' spies working within the United States seems, from the tone of the preface of this book, to provoke surprised indignation. But governments need to know what their allies, or potential allies, are up to and a huge amount of intelligence activity is devoted to this end, although, of course, everyone pretends it isn't.

Among the more comprehensive efforts to find out what one's international friends were thinking, and to influence that thinking, came from Britain in World War II when the attitude of the United States was a matter of national life and death. If the isolationist faction of Americans had triumphed and kept their country out of the war in Europe, Britain's survival would have been a much chancier affair.

In this compelling history, which is subtitled "Roald Dahl and the British spy ring in wartime Washington", Jennet Conant details the extraordinarily wide-ranging nature of London's efforts to keep tabs on and to manipulate the American political scene.

The main engine of the British web of spying, infiltration and opinion moulding was an outfit called British Security Co-ordination headed by a remarkable Canadian called William Stephenson, who characteristically allowed himself to be known under the code name Intrepid - actually his organisation's cable address.

The ranks of Stephenson's teams, who apparently called themselves the Baker St Irregulars after Sherlock Holmes' band of street life informants, included a motley crew of misfits whose key skill was their ability to mix in the right social and political circles. The young Roald Dahl, whose RAF flying career had come to an end after he was injured in a crash, was a perfect match with his heroic record, his extreme good looks and a killer charm.

Conant uses Dahl's slide into the undercover world to paint a broader picture of the hectic intelligence world of the time and of the murky waters of American politics in which Dahl and his colleagues swam. Backed by an intense friendship with the Texan oil tycoon and newspaper owner Charles E. Marsh, Dahl cultivated a high level string of contacts - and lovers - who were players in politics and media.

Like his peers, such as Bond writer Ian Fleming and future advertising guru David Ogilvy, he fed a stream of information in both directions. The input that the British managed to secure in the work of some of America's most influential journalists, in particular, seems to have been considerable.

How successful all this was remains a matter for debate. Much of Dahl's work seems to have been little more than gossip-gathering and his friends may have been less influential than they thought. There is continuing controversy about the real impact of the overall intelligence effort.

Not unnaturally, those involved, like Stephenson, have cultivated the belief that their influence was enormous but the hard evidence is a little thin and clouded by the practitioners' penchant for never telling a straight story. When the Germans were obviously heading for defeat the emphasis switched to trying to secure a British place in the American-dominated post-war world and that didn't seem to work too well.

Dahl became involved in air travel talks that sound about as riveting as a GATT round. There's no doubt, however, that the British effort had an impact on the Americans' own development of intelligence gathering, inspiring both resentment that the Brits should be operating at all inside the United States and an appreciation of what influence-peddling might do. That legacy might still be with us. Conant delivers a convincing picture of those extraordinary times, stuffed with extraordinary characters, although her British references are a bit wobbly.

The inhabitants of Cardiff, for example, might be surprised to hear they come from a fishing village. But it is a more significant weakness of the book that Dahl himself is one of the less interesting and certainly less appealing characters. His mentor, Charlie Marsh, with his bizarre domestic life and his monstrous ego, emerges as a more fascinating figure. But he didn't write Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

The Irregulars
By Jennet Conant (Simon and Schuster $34.99)

* John Gardner is an Auckland reviewer.