“Invest in American arms, steel, chemicals and petrol,” was the only guidance I gave him in 1938, as the world slid towards war. “Pull out of the Skoda arms factory, and withdraw all foreign personnel from Singapore.”
By 1948, Waterbrooke & Smith–two names chosen for no reason other than their entire lack of connection to myself–was one of the most successful companies in the northern hemisphere, with extensive and occasionally illegal contacts in South-East Asia and Africa, and growing interests in Chile, Venezuela and, in a move which I quietly had to question, Cuba. The company was successful, unethical and above all provided me with a continual influx of both ready cash–a mild interest–and global information, without my ever having to show my face.
It was one report, a tiny note in the hundred that arrived at my door every week, which sent me to Russia. The title of the document read, “Limited Exposure to PJC/9000 Portable Radio (Commercial)”.
In it an analyst briefly discussed the company’s recent investment in a radio transmitter-receiver set which had gone on the market in West Germany some two months before, whose range and quality of signal had been recognised and rewarded in the last week by a contract with the air force to fit out its stations with the new equipment. Technical specs were attached, and flicking through them I saw nothing remarkable until my eye, wandering down the page, glimpsed the operational frequency of the transmitter. It was some two hundred thousand hertz outside the normal range of the equipment of the time, and while this relatively low number, in terms of radio frequencies, might not have set off many alarm bells, the mechanism by which it appeared to achieve this effect was something which should not have been invented, let alone been available on commercial markets, for another thirteen years.
Chapter 33
Asked to think about East Germany in the 1950s, picturesque is not the word which leaps to mind. World War Two had not been kind; the Soviet tanks as they ploughed towards Berlin had not been kind. The years of uncertainty until the elections of 1948, when certainty became rather too certain indeed, had not been kind, and finally the dawn of the 1950s had brought with it a certain grey resignation. The flat landscape left no place to hide the harsh realities of an economy where intellectualism was bourgeois, labour was freedom, and brotherhood was obligatory. The people had been promised cars, so incredibly unreliable little bangers which leaped like startled hippos over every pothole, slamming the heads of the many people crowded into the tight back seats, were wheeled out with the pomp of cardboard coffins. The people had been promised food, so forests were torn down and wheat sown where no farmer would have dreamed of growing it, while industrial fertilisers stained the flat still waters of the northern lakes a scummy grey-brown.
Yet, for all this, one or two bastions of tradition survived, largely through government omission. The confiscation by the Soviets of much of Germany’s industrial equipment after the war had ranged from factory machinery down to the smallest farmyard truck, and in corners of the countryside there existed now a population of hardy widowed women who slogged through the fields, scythes in hand, their heads covered with bright scarves and their backs bent beneath the baskets that carried their crops. Blink, and you might imagine it was some idyllic rural scene. Look again, and you might see the hunger in the women’s eyes and the weight upon their shoulders as they stooped to toil.