The Dollar Compass
Supercomputers, Power Politics, and Moral Deception in the Autumn of the Cold War.
August 1985. The Cold War is shifting—quietly, unpredictably—and the stakes are enormous.
When Danish computer salesman Henrik Bertelsen becomes involved in a bold plan to supply advanced American computer systems to the Soviet Union, he steps into a world where technology, politics, and power are inseparable. Under Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika, Soviet leaders are searching for the tools to modernise a stagnating superpower. Western corporations see opportunity. Intelligence agencies see danger.
For Henrik’s struggling employer, Control Data, a major Moscow contract could mean survival. But in a system shaped by secrecy, hierarchy, and competing interests, technical superiority is not enough. Success demands strategy beyond the official tender. In Moscow, you never bet on a single horse—you cultivate multiple allies, open parallel channels, and prepare for sudden shifts in loyalty.
Negotiating with ambitious officials, sharp intermediaries, and wary diplomats, Henrik discovers that formal agreements are only part of the equation. Access must be nurtured. Favors carry weight. And in an environment where influence often moves quietly behind closed doors, a little lubrication can keep stalled machinery turning.
Meticulously researched and set against real historical tensions, The Dollar Compass is a gripping political and business novel about ambition, calculated risk, and the moral grey zones where commerce and ideology collide.
When history opens a narrow window of opportunity, how far are you willing to go?
Villy’s walnut schnapps
Bech writes like a man who has tasted both vodka and Villy’s walnut schnapps—and still stands upright. A perfect armchair travel companion.
A Genre of its Own
An exciting novel that feels like a genre of its own—entertaining, thought-provoking, and beautifully written. I was hooked from page one.
Caught in the Middle
Caught between American and Soviet values, Henrik’s story is a Cold War novel like no other—where private life, business, and politics intertwine.
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Copenhagen, Late summer, 1985.
Enter one Henrik Bertelsen – a civil servant turned computer salesman, and an unlikely emissary of Western industry – who finds himself dispatched, by circumstance and superior instruction, behind the Iron Curtain.
His brief?
To explore the feasibility of selling American supercomputing technology to the Soviet energy sector. A proposition that, mere months prior, would have been dismissed as the stuff of diplomatic fantasy.
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