The Irregulars (24 page)

At the same time Dahl was monitoring Wallace’s political temperature, he was supposed to continue cultivating Marsh, as well as other leading newspaper publishers. He needed to maintain their goodwill, as well as close links with their reporters and columnists, so he would be the first to hear if and when the president’s loyalty to Wallace showed any signs of weakening. He was always hurrying off to press lunches at the Carlton, where half of Washington conducted its daily business, to drinks with Pearson at the men’s bar of the Mayflower Hotel, and then on to the R Street house in time to catch the vice president paying his evening call. It was all grist for the mill.

To spare his feelings, Dahl may have been less than candid with Marsh about the extent of the anti-Wallace sentiment in the official British community. The vice president’s infamous pamphlet, “Our Job in the Pacific,” authored with the help of two State Department aides, John Carter Vincent and Owen Lattimore, was set to be published in the spring of 1944 by the very leftist Institute of Pacific Relations. It had deeply offended Churchill, as well as senior British officials in Washington. Thanks to Dahl’s early interception of the document, British intelligence agents were already busy snooping around the institute, looking for any evidence that could be used to discredit it, as well as scouring the backgrounds of Vincent and Lattimore. As the breach took place on his turf, Stephenson went a step further. “I came to regard Wallace as a menace,” he stated later, “and I took action to ensure that the White House was aware that the British government would view with concern Wallace’s appearance on the ticket at the 1944 presidential elections.” As usual, Stephenson’s message was delivered to the White House by Ernest Cuneo, the trusted go-between, who had recently moved to New York and taken an apartment at the Dorset, the same building where Stephenson occupied the penthouse.

In the meantime, as one of the agents closest to Wallace, Dahl had his hands full. Rumors were rife about the existence of a group of letters written by Wallace while he was still a follower of the Russian mystic Roerich, which seemed to indicate that he received guidance on government policies from the spirit world. The so-called guru letters had surfaced at the end of the last campaign and fallen into the hands of the newspaper publisher Paul Block. The Democrats had managed to stop them from coming out by threatening to use a lot of dirt they had dug up on Willkie, so the letters remained under wraps, but they were still in the possession of the Republicans. Whispers around town had it that this was why the party could not dare consider Wallace for vice president again. Jonathan Daniels, a member of Roosevelt’s palace guard, got an earful over dinner one night that August from Beanie Baldwin’s wife, who disapproved of Wallace’s religious ideas and his connection to other spiritualists. As he noted in his diary, “It seems like the big man in the whole business is a rich Texas oil man named Charles Marsh who some years ago put on the spiritualist play
The Ladder
in New York and let people come without any admission price.” The “guru letters” further excited the British interest in stuff on Wallace.

Dahl thought his bosses, from Stephenson all the way up to “C,” were positively obsessed with the vice president. “Menzies was always avid for everything he could get out of the White House and the Cabinet in regard to U.S. intentions,” he recalled, “especially anything that had to do with U.S. intentions towards the Empire.” Dahl was kept busy, and the months flew by.

Late that fall Dahl moved to another little house in Georgetown on P Street, a slightly less ramshackle affair than the last, which was one of a number rented by the British Embassy to house temporary staff. This time he shared his quarters with a remarkably handsome Scotsman named David Ogilvy, a pale, lean Lord Byron type, complete with flaming red hair and fashionable attire. Like Dahl, he had begun by freelancing for the BSC and in late 1942 joined the organization full-time. He had only recently signed on as a third secretary at the British Embassy. In the thirty-two-year-old Ogilvy, Dahl found an ideal fellow conspirator, clever, enthusiastic, and up for anything in the way of Stephenson’s best young turks. A self-proclaimed expert on American public opinion, he had spent the last four years as an associate director at George Gallup’s Audience Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey, and boasted that he had conducted more than four hundred nationwide surveys measuring the country’s pulse on every conceivable issue. Based on the Gallup polls, he claimed he could tell “what the natives want out of life, what they think about the main issues of the day, what their habits are.”

Brimming with charm, the six-foot, blue-eyed Ogilvy was perfectly cast as a snoop. In addition to looking like a leading man, he had a genius for showmanship and gave the impression of grand lineage and connections, though he lacked the inheritance the part required. Nevertheless, he projected an air of affluence and, on the forty dollars a week he earned from Gallup, somehow managed to live in a splendid eighteenth-century house called Mansgrove, located in Princeton’s leafy green academic enclave. His neighbor was the pharmaceutical tycoon Gerard B. Lambert, who had made a fortune advertising Listerine as a cure for halitosis. Lambert, an avid sailor and America’s Cup contender, regularly took him on holidays on one of his many yachts, including his famous three-masted schooner
Atlantic
. Ogilvy had a very young American wife from one of the first families of Virginia, the lovely Melinda Street, who he had met and married in 1939 when she was an eighteen-year-old student at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. She and the baby, along with the four English refugee children in their care, still resided in the Princeton manor, and he was bunking with Dahl only until he could find someplace for them all to live. He was brisk to the point of being impatient and could be rather dismissive when he thought he was talking to someone who was a bit stupid, which he considered the case more often than not. There was nothing run-of-the-mill about Ogilvy, and while he was not to everyone’s liking, Dahl thought his wit and originality outweighed his snobbishness, and they hit it off immediately.

Nothing if not eccentric, Ogilvy had come to the United States via a particularly circuitous route. Half Irish and half Scottish, he was the youngest of five, born into a genteel but impoverished family in West Horsley, England. His father, a classical scholar turned stockbroker, was forced to return to Edinburgh after being financially ruined in the market. His mother, Diana Fairfield, was a brainy beauty who read constantly, preferring to work her way from the last page of a book to the first, and was thoroughly bored by married life. Ogilvy was raised with great expectations and won a scholarship to Fettes, Scotland’s leading preparatory school, and to Christ Church College at Oxford, but was by his own admission too distracted to do any work and was expelled. Neither a great scholar nor an athlete, he was by his own account “an irreconcilable rebel—a misfit.”

Ashamed of his failure at Oxford, Ogilvy ran away from his family’s cultured background and took menial jobs, anything that was “as far away from that fancy thing as [he] could possible get.” He struggled at first to find his way and worked at various times as a chef at the Hotel Majestic in Paris, a social worker in the Edinburgh slums, and a door-to-door salesman of Aga stoves. He proved to be a natural-born salesman and sold so many stoves to tight-fisted Scots housewives that he was asked to write a sales manual for the company. “The good salesman combines the tenacity of a bulldog with the manners of a spaniel,” Ogilvy instructed in his lively guide to snagging customers, adding by way of advice, “If you have any charm, ooze it.” Having discovered his true calling, he joined his older brother Francis’s advertising firm, Mather & Crowther, and quickly worked his way up from trainee to account executive. In 1938 he talked them into sending him across the pond to study American advertising techniques. At the end of his year’s sojourn, he reported his findings to the London office and announced he was resigning to seek his fortune in America—“the most wonderful, delightful, marvelous country on earth”—where he figured he could make roughly three times as much money with the same amount of effort.

Armed with several letters of introduction, among them an endorsement from his cousin, the author Rebecca West, to Alexander Woollcott, one of the most influential drama critics in New York, he boarded a ship for the United States, traveling steerage. Ogilvy’s glib humor proved his greatest asset, and he quickly enchanted Woollcott’s theatrical circle, which included Ethel Barrymore, Ruth Gordon, Harpo Marx, George S. Kaufman, and Robert Sherwood. They opened doors for him, and in short order he was hired by Gallup’s firm to apply his polling methods to the movie industry. Ogilvy, who needed a job in a hurry as he was staying at the St. Regis Hotel and was down to his last ten dollars, jumped at the chance. It turned out to be “the greatest break” of his life.

After spending a few weeks getting a solid grounding in opinion research, Ogilvy accompanied Gallup to Hollywood. They pitched their services to the head of RKO studios, pointing out the competitive advantages of measuring the popularity of movie stars, pretesting audience acceptance of movie ideas and titles, and forecasting trends. RKO awarded them a twelve-month contract, and other studios soon followed suit, noting that David Selznick “took to ordering surveys the way other people order groceries.” Ogilvy admired Gallup immensely and gained a deep respect for the value of opinion research as a predictive tool in everything from marketing to politics. He found his time in Hollywood both entertaining and instructive and hobnobbed with some of the most famous movie stars of the day, almost all of whom he considered “repulsive egotists.” As a result of his audience research, Ogilvy discovered that certain marquee names had a negative effect on a picture’s earnings, and he assembled a classified list he called “box office poison” that prematurely ended many a career. “There is no great trick to doing research,” Ogilvy later observed. “The problem is to get people to use it—particularly when the research reveals that you have been making mistakes.” Most people, he found, had “a tendency to use research as a drunkard uses a lamppost—for support, not for illumination.”

In the spring of 1940 Gallup organized the Public Opinion Research Project, financed by a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, and appointed one of his colleagues, Hadley Cantril, as director. Gallup and Cantril sampled American attitudes toward the war in Europe using the fact-finding machinery he had developed at his institute. In June of that year, Gallup’s polls revealed that the vast majority of Americans did not want the United States to declare war and send an army and navy to Europe. The most striking thing about the poll results was that while only about 7 percent of Americans wanted to declare war on Germany, when asked “Do you think the United States is giving too much help to England and France at this time, not enough help, or about the right amount of help?” nearly three-quarters of the respondents answered “Not enough.” The polls also indicated a real desire to aid the British and French as much as possible: 64 percent of the American public believed the United States should do everything possible to help democracies short of going to war.

The British regarded Gallup’s polls as extremely useful sources of information, and since many of the polls were kept secret, they set about penetrating the organization. It was to this end that Stephenson first approached Ogilvy, a British subject employed as one of Gallup’s assistant directors, and he “readily agreed to cooperate.” According to the official BSC history, from late 1941 on Ogilvy was “able to ensure a constant flow of intelligence on public opinion in the United States, since he had access not only to the questionnaires sent out by Gallup and Cantril and to the recommendations offered by the latter to the White House,” but also to internal reports prepared by the Survey Division of the Office of War Information and by the Opinion Research Division of the U.S. Army.

As the official history study points out, “The mass of information which the BSC collected in this way was obviously of interest to London.” Gallup’s polls gave the British a real sense of the lag between the volume of desire on the part of American people to help them and the lack of congressional action necessary to fulfill this desire. The polls also indicated that as the possibility of a German victory was regarded as more likely, Americans felt a greater potential threat to their values and way of life. These findings were particularly valuable to the British in helping to determine what kinds of wartime propaganda would be most effective, and how to concentrate their efforts to subtly shift the balance of American opinion toward the idea that the British and French were fighting mainly to preserve democracy rather than protect their national wealth and power.

Ogilvy, by his own account, had been “moonlighting” as an adviser to the British government, passing along poll data that could influence political strategy, when Stephenson offered him a chance to take on a more active role. With U.S. intervention the key to Britain’s survival, he quit his job and went to work for the BSC in Washington. Stephenson recognized that the same energy and daring that had led Ogilvy to jettison a burgeoning career and reinvent himself in America were qualities that would be of incalculable value in an intelligence agent. He promptly dispatched Ogilvy to Camp X, the BSC’s secret training facility, which had been hastily established in the fall of 1941 on the north shore of Lake Ontario, twenty-five miles outside Toronto. Most of the 260-acre site consisted of flat, scrubby fields and rough woodland, with only an old eight-room farmhouse and a handful of outbuildings that served as storerooms once the camp was built. It was an ideal location, isolated enough to be secure but, with Toronto just two hours from New York by air, easily accessible.

Here in the frozen woods outside Oshawa, the BSC’s raw agent recruits, a hundred or so at a time, received basic instruction in the conduct of operations in the field and information gathering, as well as useful skills such as housebreaking, safe blowing, and lock picking. They also received some special training in the use of various kinds of weapons and explosive devices. The school had a staff of thirty, all experts in their particular line, and was run with military efficiency by the commandant, Colonel Bill Brooker. According to Sweet-Escott, “Brooker was a born salesman. He was a brilliant and convincing lecturer, and an immense fund of stories from the real life of a secret agent to illustrate his points.” Most of Brooker’s guest visitors from the OSS who passed through the school left with “a much clearer idea of what secret operations were likely to involve than anything we could give them in Washington,” even if Sweet-Escott could not vouch for “the exact truth” of all the anecdotes they heard.