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Roald Dahl was a real-life James Bond style spy, new book reveals
By Andrew Alderson, Chief Reporter
Published: 8:11PM BST 07 Aug 2010
Roald Dahl led an extraordinary life in America during the Second World War as a philandering James Bond-style spy with a "stable" of women, a new biography of the children's author reveals.

Apparently motivated by a combination of duty and lust, Dahl slept with countless high society women while gathering intelligence in the United States.

His life as a young, handsome and dashing RAF officer in the early 1940s is detailed in a new book by Donald Sturrock, Storyteller: The Life of Roald Dahl, which is serialised today in The Sunday Telegraph.

Antoinette Haskell, a wealthy friend of Dahl's who looked up to him as a brother even though he was "drop dead gorgeous", said the author had a "whole stable" of women to wait on his every need. "He was very arrogant with his women, but he got away with it. The uniform didn't hurt one bit – and he was an ace [pilot]," she said. "I think he slept with everybody on the east and west coasts that had more than $50,000 a year."

Dahl had fought as a fighter pilot earlier in the war, until injuries grounded him. He then worked for a secret service network based in the United States called British Security Coordination (BSC). It had been initially established to promote UK interests in the United States and to counter Nazi propaganda.

It is not known exactly how Dahl was recruited as a British agent, but it is thought he was working loosely for BSC by the first four months of 1944 when, officially, he had a public relations role at the British Embassy in Washington DC. He was "run" from New York by William Stephenson, a buccaneering Canadian industrialist and businessman.

Yet Dahl's secretive role went against the grain because he was a terrible gossip who frequently betrayed confidences, according to his family and friends. His daughter Lucy admitted: "Dad never could keep his mouth shut."

The new biography also examines Dahl's allegations of bullying and brutality during his public school days at Repton, which the children's author wrote about in his book Boy. Dahl blamed Geoffrey Fisher, the Headmaster of Repton and who went on to become the Archbishop of Canterbury, for a vicious caning that left him bloodied and questioning his religious faith.

However, it has emerged that Dahl, who died in 1990 aged 74, was wrong to blame Fisher for his beating in the summer of 1933. By then, Fisher had left Repton to become Bishop of Chester and so the caning was, in fact, administered by John Christie, his successor as Headmaster.

In the first part of the book, a man with magical powers takes some ordinary humans up into space in a highly advanced, unconventional spaceship, the capabilities of which easily outstrip those of the conventional US space shuttle which is launched at the same time. Both the spaceships are on their way to rendevous with another, much larger craft already in orbit. The advanced ship reaches the larger craft first by virtue of its superior capabilities only to find that the craft has been overrun by hostile aliens. The exploratory mission then becomes a rescue mission, with the magician using his advanced craft to rescue the human occupants of the larger craft (the "staff") as well as the astronauts of the US shuttle and return them safely to earth.

While all this is taking place in space, on earth the president of the US and his staff mistakenly think the magician and his craft are in fact aliens and attempt to contact them as such. The president and his staff are portrayed as unintelligent and incompetent, deferring in all their decisions to the president's "Nanny" on whom he has relied since childhood

On returning to earth the magician attempts to use a substance to make some of the characters younger. However mistakes mean that he is forced to attempt to reverse the process resulting in one of the characters becoming old enough to remember arriving on the Mayflower. This is soon put right and they are all requested to join the president at the White House for dinner.