“Of course.”
This was the ritual way of accounting for the bombings and other terrorist acts then being carried out by local Palestinian guerrillas. These were splinter groups mostly, with Marxist and Maoist leanings, who, when they weren’t plaguing the insufficiently cooperative Jordanian and Lebanese authorities across the frontier, busied themselves with provocations which could be blamed on the Israelis. Such activities also served notice on any of their Syrian “brothers” who might be hankering after peace that they had better think again.
“Were they caught?” I asked.
“Unfortunately, no. Time bombs were used. Our security forces don’t yet seem to have learned the right lessons.”
And they never would learn, of course. According to Mao, guerrillas should move like fish in a friendly sea of people. If, in Syria, the sea was not all friendly, hostile currents were few. Those of the security services who did not actively assist the guerrillas adopted an averted-eyes policy. The magic labels “Palestine” and “Palestinian” could transform the most brutish killer into a gallant young fighter for freedom, and, providing that he did not go too far too openly, he would be safe. Dr. Hawa knew this as well as I did. Besides, no guerrilla was going to blow up a Middle East Airlines plane, even as a provocation. I still thought that he was using the bomb scares to get at me.
The coffee came in. “However,” Dr. Hawa went on, “it is easy to be critical when one has not the responsibility. We must be patient. Meanwhile, as I say, we take precautions to protect our friends — especially those friends who are helping us to build for the future.” He gave me a whimsical smile. “Would you like to take over the management of a tire re-treading plant, Michael?”
“Thank you, Minister, no.” I smiled, too. He had been getting at me.
This tire thing was a rather bad standing joke. The retreading cooperative had been the brainchild of an Armenian who had made his money out of crystallized fruit, and it had been a disaster. At least fifty percent of the retreads produced had proved defective, in some cases dangerously so. An accident involving a long-distance bus, in which three people had been killed, was known to have been caused by a blowout of one of these tires. Hawa had had difficulty in hushing the story up, and was still looking for a face-saving way out of the mess. Although he well knew by now that I had no intention of providing it, he continued to ask the question. It was a way of letting me know that, while my refusal to do him that particular favour would not necessarily be held against me, it had by no means been forgotten.
“Then let us talk about this manganese dioxide.” He chuckled. “I must say that when I heard of your interest I was puzzled. I know that you order strange chemicals to make your coloured glazes, but this was obviously exceptional. Sixty tons?”
This is not for a glaze, Minister. The idea was to use it to make Leclanché cells.”
“I don’t think I understand.”
The Leclanché is a primary cell, a rather primitive source of electrical energy. It has been largely superseded by the dry battery, though they both work on the same principle. The Leclanché is a wet battery and a bit cumbersome, but it has its uses.”
“Such as what?”
“Many things that a dry battery can do — ring door bells, or buzzers; work concierge locks; power internal telephone circuits, and so on. They have the advantages of long life and low initial cost.”
He was nodding thoughtfully, a faraway look in his eyes. “A primary source of electrical energy,” he said slowly.
He made it sound like the Aswan High Dam. His ability instantly to scramble a sober statement of fact into a misleading PR fiction was extraordinary.
“The point is,” I said, “that it is a very simple thing. The cathode consists of a porous ceramic pot, which we could easily make, packed with manganese dioxide and carbon around a carbon plate. The anode is a zinc rod. The two of them stand in a jar, usually glass, but we could make it of glazed earthenware. The electrolyte is a solution of ammonium chloride, a very cheap material, in ordinary tap water. The zinc we would have to buy abroad, but the rest of it we could manage ourselves — that is, if this manganese dioxide is all right.”
“What could be wrong with it?”
“For one thing it could have been contaminated with seawater. That is why I asked for samples to test.”
He opened a drawer in his desk and took out a small jar. “In your absence,” he said, “I also asked for samples and had tests made. I am told that it is the standard pulverized ore, probably from the Caucasus, with only the usual minor impurities. With sixty tons how many of these batteries could you make?”
“More than I could sell probably, tens of thousands.”
“But here we could create the demand?”
“By cutting down on the imports of certain sizes of dry battery, yes.”
“You said that the principle of this battery is the same as that of the dry battery. Why could we not make dry batteries ourselves?”
“I would have to have notice of that question, Minister. Dry batteries are mass-produced by the billions nowadays in Japan, America, and Europe. I can investigate, of course. But the battery I am talking about can be made in the ceramics factory. We would need an extra shed or two and a few men under a charge hand to do the work, but that is all No big capital expenditure, and something useful produced with our own resources.”
“Dry batteries are labelled. Could we label these batteries?”
“Yes, we could.” I did not add that labels stuck on glazed jars very quickly come unstuck, because I knew what was bothering him. Few of the products we made carried any sort of advertisement. For a man with his taste for publicity it must have been very frustrating.
“The labels should be highly coloured,” he said. “And we should have a brand name. I will think about it.”
The brand name he eventually decided upon was “Green Circle.”
During the next two years we made over twenty thousand Leclanché cells bearing the Green Circle label, and managed to dispose of most of them at a decent profit. In Yemen and Somalia we did particularly well with them. As a sideline for the ceramics factory they had been useful.
If I had been able to leave it at that all would have been well. Unfortunately, Dr. Hawa was by then no longer interested in sidelines, however useful. Now he wanted the more ambitious kind of project which could be used to dress up the monthly reports which his Ministry issued; reports designed to show that the pace of development was continually accelerating and to confound his critics, who were becoming vocal, with evidence of fresh miracles to come. The truth was that too much had been promised too publicly, and now he was having to pay the penalty. Dr. Hawa was beginning to slip.
He never even consulted me about the feasibility of the dry battery project. He had one of his minions do some hasty research on the manufacturing processes involved. The minion, who cannot have done much more than browse through an out-of-date textbook, reported back that the processes were simple, the necessary materials in good supply, and that, with good management and some unskilled female labour, the thing could be done.
That was enough for Hawa. He announced the new project the following morning and handed it over to me in the afternoon. He didn’t ask me if I would accept it; those days were over. I was assigned the project, and if I didn’t like it — well, a private company under contract to a government agency was always vulnerable unless protected by its friends. For example, the Ministry of Finance had often pressed for the cancellation of those exclusive selling agencies granted to the company so long ago. So far these pressures had been resisted and the company’s interests protected, but such protection must be earned.