Post #644368 by Cammo on Tue, Jul 17, 2012 6:07 AM

PART 4
Real Life Spies

All Who-Was-Bond speculation became pretty much a waste of a jolly good time after the 2008 publication of Jennet Conant’s The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington. Roald Dahl, it turns out, wasn’t just the writer of the best children’s novels ever penned, husband of Patricia Neal (The Day The Earth Stood Still, Rowr!) and a major wartime aviation hero. He was apparently the sneakiest bastard who ever lived, both Churchill’s and Stephenson’s top agent and the one man who actually seems to have penetrated Roosevelt’s security services well enough to have spent most weekends with FDR at his cottage estate in his shorts while photographing every document he could get his sticky little mitts on.

He also bedded an endless list of Washington socialites including Claire Booth Luce, dined nightly on gold tableware and steak while the blitz reduced Londoners to beans and Spam, lied about his flying exploits, and seemingly became the only man in the USA not screwed by Charles Marsh’s nymphomaniac wife, mostly because his dick was simply too overworked already!

The logistics of how he became a sex machine were even more strange, and his short later series of very adult stories about My Uncle Oswald may have held a clue. Packs of marijuana, it turns out, were distributed to most top field agents in WW2 as a miracle truth serum. Spymasters had found that smoking out your target with pot-laced tobacco (aka “Turkish Cigarettes”) caused them to joyously spill their guts on any subject you decided to discuss at a local bar. Stronger pot, in the form of hash oil carefully injected into regular cigarettes (“try mine, they’re Turkish”) or dashed into their favorite Martinis (“I’ll mix”) caused proper ladies to become impatiently horny whores in Dahl’s hands, then extremely tired, and waking the next morning with no hangover - in that order; perfect for Roald’s plan to pillow talk his way through wartime Washington. Pocket flasks of super strong hash oil transferred by diplomatic pouch by his own published admission were probably Dahl’s ultra-secret weapon, also leading one to think it helped him to write his first short stories - like the brilliant early-psychedelic Shot Down Over Libya, most of which is spent on a bed watching the colors of the room dance around him.

Almost all of the key English spies retired to Jamaica a decade later, the verrah English soil of which supported vast acres of pot plantations. Coincidence? Not in Ian Fleming’s case, whose son-in-law Chris Blackwell founded Island Records - the most marijuana drenched music ever recorded, which is saying something...