The '007' Career of Roald Dahl

A new biography of Roald Dahl, the famous author of children's books who also wrote the shooting script for EON's fifth Bond film 'You Only Live Twice', has offered some new information on his 007-style wartime career.

Extracts from the new biography, 'Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl', by Donald Sturrock, have appeared in the Daily and Sunday Telegraph, and show how Dahl led 'an extraordinary life' in the USA during the Second World War, working for a British intelligence network called 'British Security Co-ordination' (BSC). The highly secret organisation was established to promote British interests in America, to help persuade American public opinion and the media to support the War, and to stop the spread of Nazi propaganda.

The biography reveals that, as part of his job, Dahl, seen by his contemporaries as a dashing young RAF officer and a 'skilled flirt', slept with numerous high society and influential American women in order to persuade them to show public sympathy for the British wartime cause.

The BSC organisation was run from New York by the eccentric Canadian businessman and millionaire William Stephenson, who was a close friend of Winston Churchill and had a flair for technical innovation. Churchill had personally selected Stephenson to establish BSC, designed to distribute pro-UK propaganda in the American media and to train a network of spies. The enigmatic spymaster was given the codename 'Intrepid'. Dahl's RAF flying career was curtailed after an accident in 1941 and, shortly after, he began to work for BSC. He was apparently fascinated by his new boss, who encouraged him to use his 'wining and dining' skills with women to gather important gossip and information.

According to Sturrock, Dahl's most significant conquest was the well-connected oil heiress Millicent Rogers, who was probably also having an affair with Dahl's close friend Ian Fleming at the same time. Rogers became infatuated with Dahl but, according to the new biography: 'For Dahl, none of these encounters seems to have involved any serious serious emotional commitment'.

Dahl, Fleming and Bond

Interest in Dahl's clandestine career has grown markedly in recent years. It featured strongly in the 2008 book 'The Irregulars' by Jennet Conant, which also offered a history of Britain's BSC spy ring in New York and Washington. Dahl and his co-conspirators - especially David Ogilvy, Ian Fleming, and Ivar Bryce - did their best to carry out various cloak-and-dagger assignments for the both the British and the general Allied cause.

Dahl, of course, later became famous as a prolific author of stories for children, including 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory'. Despite having very little experience of writing for the big screen, Dahl was recruited by Broccoli and Saltzman to deliver a new story for 'You Only Live Twice', as the Bond producers considered Fleming's 1964 book as near-unfilmable. Dahl dropped much of Fleming's basic plot, but retained some of the key characters, and delivered a new space-age story which played upon fears of nuclear war. He turned in the first draft in only six weeks.