Aaron Tracy (17:30)
Picture Dahl in his early 20s. That critical moment when most of us are fumbling to find our path. Not long before, he'd been soaring through the skies as a fighter pilot for the Royal Air Force. But a series of catastrophic crashes had left him broken, his flying career abruptly terminated. So now he's at a crossroads. The war continues to rage, but his part in it has been stripped away and he's looking for what to do with his life. Dahl finds himself at a cocktail party in London that a date has dragged him to. He towers awkwardly above the crowd, nursing a drink, contemplating an early exit. It's an elite crowd, but it's a lot of rehearsed anecdotes and performative laughter. Then something catches his eye. A solitary figure standing apart. Not a film star or socialite, but someone far more intriguing to a political obsessive like Dahl. Major Harold Balfour, a member of Churchill's war cabinet, one of the men literally deciding the fate of Britain as German bombs fall on London. Dahl senses this could be his chance. Impressing the major might lead to something, though he has no idea that this conversation will alter the trajectory of his entire life. Let me pause here for a quick sec to set the scene for what's going on in the world, because it's crucial to what Dahl is about to become part of. The late 1930s and early 40s are one of those rare times that it's not an exaggeration to say the fate of the world is at stake. Hitler isn't just winning battles, he's winning the war, mostly because the US is sitting on the sidelines. The British ambassador warns his government that 9 out of 10Americans are determined to. To stay out of the war. In other words, to not help Britain. The most famous of these is Charles Lindbergh. It is now obvious that England is losing war. And I have been forced to the conclusion that we cannot win this war for England, regardless of how much assistance we send. That is why the America First Committee has been. And this is. While Germany is sweeping through Europe, the Nazis take Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and France. In America, we're just watching it unfold. Many, if not most, Americans are still traumatized from the first time we joined in a world war 20 years earlier, the memory of American boys coming home in coffins or not coming home at all, remains raw. The thinking is simply that Hitler is not our problem. The public isn't yet aware of what's going on with the Jews of Europe. The reports of them being rounded up and sent to concentration camps is just too impossible to believe. So we choose not to. Britain, of course, is on the brink. You know this. You've seen the movies, read the books, listened to the podcasts. Think Churchill pacing war rooms by lamplight. Britain's darkest hour. If FDR doesn't send help, and fast, England is done. So put yourself in Winston Churchill's position. Your island nation stands as one of the last flickering lights of democracy in Europe. Your cities are being bombed into rubble. Your people are sleeping in subway tunnels. And across the Atlantic sits America, powerful, untouched, and stubbornly unwilling to join the fight. What wouldn't you do to change their minds at that point? Is anything off the table? This is where espionage becomes not just an option, but a necessity. Okay, so back to our cocktail party. Dahl spots Major Balfour, a man whose signature on documents can move troops and redirect warplanes. Dahl takes a deep breath, and with that peculiar confidence that will define him throughout his life, he crosses the room, introduces himself, and simply begins to chat. Dahl gives great chat. His conversation has all the hallmarks of his later fiction. Wickedly funny, wildly creative, a little dirty, totally compelling. Dahl is one of those people who just instinctively knows how to captivate. I'm always so jealous of those people, the ones who have small crowds gathered around them at parties. Funny and magnetic, without being at all self conscious. The Major, like everyone else who meets Dahl in this period, is taken with him. And then it happens. The Major tells Dahl that he's looking for smart, well educated young men to go to America to join the British Embassy. This conversation has changed everything, but not how Dahl thinks it has. Dahl thinks he's being recruited for a diplomatic post. What the Major leaves out is what he really has in mind for Dahl. Military Intelligence, the head of the Irregulars, has tasked the Major with finding brilliant, articulate, charming, morally flexible young men with military backgrounds to join him outfit. The Major seems to have found such a man. The very next week, Dahl is on a plane to Washington. When Dahl first arrives in dc, he's entranced. It's this big cauldron of power. Ego mixed with ambition, mixed with sex, mixed again with power. Yet it all feels as intimate as a college campus. Everybody knows everybody. I grew up in D.C. and in the northwest part of it. Walk into any restaurant, linger in any bookstore, sit at any coffee shop counter, and people are talking politics. It's in the water supply, just like the entertainment industry in la. So every room Dahl enters is an opportunity. Dahl's trickiest endeavor when he first arrives is finding decent housing in the notoriously overcrowded city. He opens the newspaper and looks through the classifieds. He finds a surprisingly nice place that he can actually afford. The reason he can afford it is because there was a bloody murder suicide in it last week. The murder victim, Rosemary Sigley, was a beautiful young researcher for the agency that becomes the CIA. She was also a wealthy heiress. Her murder was a giant scandal. And two days after, there was a line of people outside waiting to see if the scene of the crime would be rented at a discount. You gotta love the real estate market. But what's important for us is that Dahl is the first man in that line, which tells you so much about who he is. The future author of tales filled with darkly comic violence isn't remotely bothered by the apartment's bloody history. If anything, there's a flicker of fascination as he signs the lease. The apartment's gruesome backstory isn't a deterrent. It's almost an attraction. The man loves gruesome. Here's one of his most beloved books with a little girl torturing her nemesis. Ah, it's a snake. One of you tried to poison me. Who? Matilda. I knew it. So much of Dahl's fiction pulls the reader towards scenes of fear and dread. There's a ton of children in peril and adults with real bad intentions. Danger lurking in what we thought were safe spaces. He's able to conjure these scenes so well because they're part of his fabric. Dahl sees darkness everywhere, which means he barely notices it anymore. When Dahl moves into Rosemary's Place, it takes him two nights before he spots the rusty blood stains still on the carpet and the single bullet hole in the ceiling. Lots of people, me very much included, would immediately move out. Dahl simply makes a mental note of it, another detail in the strange tapestry of his life, and goes to sleep under the same roof where a bullet ended. Someone else's. Now Dahl is ostensibly in D.C. to work for the British Embassy. So that's what he does for a while. He pushes diplomatic papers, attends formal functions, fills out reports, and he's suffocating. Each morning, he sits before stacks of documents, watching the clock move with excruciating slowness. Dahl wants something bigger for his life. He's searching for something with meaning. But what Dahl doesn't realize is that someone is watching his every move. The big legendary figure you need to know about right now is William Stevenson. Intrepid Stevenson is Winston Churchill's head of espionage in America. He's one of the key inspirations for James Bond, who was Created by one of his agents. This gives you a sense of what Stephenson looks impeccably dressed, handsome features and penetrating eyes that catalog everything. He's clean cut, can pose and emanates the confidence of a man who can. Have you vanished with a single phone call? This is the man whose attention now turns to Roald Dahl to accomplish Britain's mission during this really scary time. Stevenson is the one who assembles that elite spy ring, the Irregulars. Writer and historian Jeanette Conant calls their operation one of the most controversial and almost certainly one of the most successful covert action campaigns in the annals of espionage. Stevenson's eye for talent is wild, just for starters. There's Roald Dahl, of course. And Ian Fleming, who later creates James Bond, essentially immortalizing his own experiences here. And David Ogilvy, who goes on to invent modern advertising. Three world class creators of fantasy. So picture Roald Dahl, James Bond and Don Draper all hanging out, drinking and seducing their way through a foreign capital during wartime, and you start to have a sense of what it's like. The whole thing feels like the premise of a prestige TV series. Beautiful, rakish young men recruited into a shadow organization far from home because of their smarts, persuasiveness and talent for deception, tasked with doing whatever they have to to save the free world from fascism. The mission of the Irregulars is broad. Gathering intelligence, sabotaging enemies and creating propaganda that shifts public opinion. Their official history describes them as empowered with the vague task of doing all that was not being done and could not be done by other means. Which, come on, is a license to operate in the gray areas if I've ever heard one. Dahl can't believe he's been recruited into this group. A month ago, he was languishing in the English countryside, desperate to figure out his life, hungry for purpose. Now he's found a role filled with subterfuge, deceit, storytelling and roleplay. In other words, all of his natural skills with the highest stakes imaginable. The personal stakes for Dahl are huge too. He can't go home to Buckinghamshire after this and tend to the sheep. This job is about to become his whole identity. You can tell how formative it all is for Dahl by the fact that it echoes through his later fiction like a recurring dream. Willy Wonka with an air of mystery beneath a playful exterior, constantly testing those who enter his orbit. He's definitely inspired by Stevenson and others Dahl works for in the spy game. Also the secret society and the witches that performs covert missions. All of these stories that are going to captivate millions of children are born in the shadows of wartime espionage. So far, though, the Irregulars are failing at their task of winning America to their side. They're forced to get creative. One of my favorite tactics of theirs is when they hire a Hungarian astrologer, Louis de Waal. The assignment they give him to publicly predict Hitler's demise based on the positions of the stars and therefore make Germany seem less scary to Americans. It's like a PR smear campaign on the fascist dictator. Can't you just picture these young Irregulars around a table at 2am at some smoky Georgetown bar, whiskey flowing, one says, what if we just told Americans they have nothing to lose because the stars have already decided the Third Reich is done for. And instead of laughing it off, there's a long silence. They look at each other intensely and say, that is brilliant. They're so tickled with their idea, they send Louis on a national tour. Stevenson's main tactics, however, involve targeting the upper echelons of the US government. And this is both to bring the US into the war and, once that's accomplished, to make sure London maintains significant influence. If Britain can get someone close to the American president, that would be huge. Enter young Roald Dahlia. It turns out one of Dahl's skills in particular makes him especially effective with the Irregulars. It's the same skill he'll later become legendary his storytelling. Dahl has recently begun writing short stories. It's not yet the all consuming passion it will become. Like many young writers, Dahl is trying to find his voice by writing mostly autobiographically. Specifically, he's churning out brief fiction pieces inspired by his childhood and his time in the Royal Air Force. The stories are clever and dark, a little scary and totally original. One story in particular centers on these grotesque little creatures he calls gremlins who sabotage aircraft. A fun gothic story which doubles as a fable for American and British cooperation. One reason Dahl's work continues to be read and seen and performed over a century after his birth is that like Greek myths, his narratives tap directly into our primal fears and desires. They speak to universal human concerns, wrapped in the irresistible package of the bizarre and scary and funny. The Gremlins has all of this, and in case you're wondering, as I was this Gremlins has nothing to do with the Steven Spielberg produced classic. Dahl mails the story out to every magazine excepting unsolicited submissions and one bites. The Gremlins gets published in a local journal and the story connects with readers. Those who dig it, pass it around. To their pals. Of course, in these days that means literally handing your copy of the physical magazine to someone eventually. Because this is just how Dahl's luck works. His story gets passed to a certain very important person you may have heard
