Roald Dahl: the swordsman spy

A new book about Roald Dahl (pictured in the 1940s), focusing on the time he spent as a spy attached to the British embassy during the Second World War, reveals that the celebrated children's author was employed by the government to charm and then sleep with well-connected Americans in order to win confidences from them.

The author of the book, Jennet Conant, an American journalist, has drawn on a cache of previously unpublished letters and other documents from the family of one of Dahl's closest American friends, Charles Marsh, a self-made Texan newspaper magnate. "Dahl's superiors watched his rake's progress with grudging admiration," Conant writes in The Irregulars: Roald Dahl and the British Spy Ring in Wartime Washington, published next week. "A certain amount of hanky-panky was condoned, especially when it was for a good cause."

According to Conant, the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory's conquests included Millicent Rogers, the glamorous heiress to a Standard Oil fortune, Clare Boothe Luce, a right-wing congresswoman, and the sexually frisky wife of the publisher of Time magazine. His job, writes Conant, was "to be as engaging as possible, a bright and breezy presence at table, and encourage confidences from those in the know".

Conant's findings are confirmed by Antoinette Marsh Haskell, Charles Marsh's daughter. She told the Sunday Times: "Girls just fell at Roald's feet. There was a parade of women." At one point he turned up at the Marshes' home with a woman who was said to be General Dwight Eisenhower's mistress. Adds Marsh Haskell: "I think he liked to show them off to my father."

Dahl's 'under bed cover' work came about after he was injured during training as an RAF pilot. He was shipped to the Washington embassy in 1942. He was eventually befriended by Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of President Franklin D Roosevelt, and became a regular visitor to the White House, where he was big hit.