Book Description

Berlin, 1939. An American tourist walks into the bar of the Adlon Hotel and offers, while under the influence, to bet that Germany and Russia will make common cause against Poland in the near future. The locals don’t buy such an outlandish prediction and eagerly accept his wager. Later that evening, the news comes over the radio that Germany and the USSR have just signed a nonaggression pact. Six years later, Professor Harry Gordon is still gambling, winning a quarter of a million dollars on a long shot at Belmont Park in New York and making steady profits on the stock market as well. He also seems to have acquired even more dangerous hobbies. When a prominent scientist goes missing in Mexico during a riot, he is eating at a restaurant down the street. When important documents disappear from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, he is busy sending off tightly-packed envelopes to foreign embassies. When the CIA brings counterrevolution to Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, he happens to be watching from a nearby hill. As it turns out, the Professor is not content merely to observe events as historians usually do. He wants to play a role in manipulating them. Aided and abetted by an American draft dodger, an Australian pilot, and a former Soviet spy, the Professor works by devious routes to hammer into the public imagination the idea that there is a worse threat to the American way of life than mere Communism. And then, in the background, he quietly goes about increasing that threat by every means in his power. By 1968, France, Israel and Iran are forming a nuclear triumvirate that dominates the Mediterranean world. The United States is refocusing its foreign policy on a revival of the Monroe Doctrine. Southern Asia and China are balancing on the verge of the worst famine in centuries. Africa is in flames from Alexandria to Cape Town. The Soviet Union is depending on American resources in order to survive, and vice versa. In these circumstances, the Professor’s efforts to carve out an improved future for humanity appear to have failed. Any effect they may have had on history will be lost in the spreading patterns of conflict that are busy plunging nation after nation into internal strife. Or will it?