Roald Dahl was a real-life James Bond style spy, new book reveals

Andrew Alderson
London Telegraph
August 7, 2010

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

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• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

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.”

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.

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