When he enlisted in the United States Army at Fort Devens in 1944, the young German Jew, whose family had escaped Hitler’s Germany to settle in rural America, did not expect to be posted to a base in Calcutta. Much less would he have imagined that one day his obituary would appear in The Financial Times of London.‘Bye Bye Mr Sugar’ the FT obit said in 2011, bidding farewell to a well-heeled gentleman who had made his reputation and money as one of the foremost authorities on the global sugar economy. He had spent his last years in a well-appointed home not far from Highgate Cemetery, the resting place of Karl Marx. It’s a home where I spent an evening with him, talking about sugar and revolution, while being taught how to mix Angostura bitters in Barbadian rum. That was in September 1990.His is a story I have been waiting to tell. It begins with my spotting a thin book with a yellow cover tucked between grey and brown coloured tomes in my father’s bookshelf. It was the 1970s. The book shelf had all manner of books from Aldous Huxley to Ramana Maharishi, John Updike to Mahatma Gandhi. Churchill’s history of the Second World War to the poetry of W.B. Yeats. On one of my usual rummaging raids I pulled that thin yellow book out.The title, printed in red, read ‘American Shadow Over India’. The author, L. Natarajan. Published in 1952 by the Communist Party of India’s People’s Publishing House in Bombay. The book had a Foreword by J.C. Kumarappa, a nationalist economist of repute, an associate of Mahatma Gandhi and a member of the National Planning Committee of the Indian National Congress.Natarajan’s book was an expose. It documented the rising influence of the United States in a newly independent India. It examined in detail the trade and investment links between the US and India before, during and after the war. It analysed the immediate post-independence relations between the governments of India and the US. It had chapters on US intelligence operations in India, on US aid to India, on the activities of American Christian missionaries, on American influence in research institutions and universities across India. It documented US thinking on India’s relations with her immediate neighbours, especially China and Pakistan. On every topic it offered a well-documented analysis.I read the book with great interest. I quoted from it in my essays and classroom lectures during the 1980s, when I was teaching development economics at a university. There wasn’t a page in it that I had not read with great attention. So I was taken aback when Jerry drew my attention to a line in Natarajan’s Preface that I had not paid any attention to:“I wish to acknowledge in particular my debt to an American friend who has not only sent me clippings, official publications and other invaluable material, but has given me much of his time and energy finding the answers to my numerous questions. It is my great regret that he wishes to remain anonymous and cannot be named as the co-author.”Did you ever wonder who the anonymous American was, Jerry asked. I may have at the time but never bothered to find out more. As an American of German Jewish origin, stationed at a US army base in Calcutta during the last days of the Second World War, Sargent-Major Jerry Hagelberg befriended fellow communist sympathisers in the US army. Many of them came in contact with local Indian communists. Calcutta was bustling with many. Natarajan was one of them. Jerry did not claim to be the ‘co-author’ that Natarajan thanked but confessed that he was a conduit between Natarajan and the American citizens who helped provide much of the information in the book.Beginning from his stay in Calcutta in the late 1940s and continuing over the next few years, Jerry and his contacts within the American communist party acquired and shared authentic, often classified, material that enabled Natarajan to write a well-informed book. Jerry’s friends belonged to a generation of Americans who valued their country’s democratic credentials and worried that a post-War America would go the way of the European imperialists from whose clutches their young nation had also liberated itself. They worried that as a victor in the war an empowered US would become like Britain and France, an imperial power seeking global influence.Theirs was not a generation that would be surprised by President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell speech of 1961, when he demitted office, in which he worried about the growing influence over government policy of what he dubbed the ‘military-industrial complex’ – an alliance of big money, the armaments industry, a power-drunk military leadership and politicians with imperial pretensions. Nipping this in the bud was the project of that generation of liberals and radicals.Natarajan’s book is the only such fact-based account of American influence-mongering in India. Many books have been written over the past three quarters of a century on US-India relations, but none has documented and analysed the manner in which the US tried to step in to imperial Britain’s shoes in India, hoping to prevent post-colonial India from being ensnared by a communist Soviet Union.Natarajan’s 1952 edition was republished in 1956. Jerry and friends continued to help till anti-communist McCarthyism caught up with them. The US Congress’s House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy hounded many liberals and leftists in the name of national security. It was a witch hunt in search of, as some would put it, ‘reds under the beds’.Jerry’s family had escaped, like many German Jews, Hitler’s fascism and he was now running away from its American variant. Escaping McCarthyism, Jerry returned to post-War Germany and studied agronomy. His research work helped him secure a job at a sugar plantation in Cuba where he once again reconnected with sympathetic comrades.As an expert on sugar he became interested in Cuba’s development and eventually educated himself enough in economics to become the economics editor at Granma, the journal of Cuban revolutionaries. Jerry came close to Che Guevara. After Che’s death Jerry became critical of Fidel Castro’s style of governance and moved to Barbados.While he kept an eye on Cuba’s sugar economy, and advised the Castro government from time to time, he did that from Barbados, where he rose to become an advisor to the government. Jerry finally moved to London where he was much sought after by global sugar majors and investors for his expertise on the global sugar economy.It was my doctoral dissertation on the political economy of sugar pricing in India that brought me in contact with Jerry. We were both in Norwich, England, at an international conference on the world sugar economy in September 1990. Jerry invited me to visit him at his London home on my way back to India. It was on that memorable evening that he shared his life’s story and the link with Natarajan’s book.Jerry Hagelberg. Photo: https://openlibrary.org/As a European Jew posted in India, as an American soldier fighting for liberty and democracy against fascism and militarism, Jerry and his comrades were inspired by the patriotism of the Indians around them. Soviet communists had allied with the US and Britain in their fight against fascism. Jerry was inspired by their patriotism. However, he was also worried that after the war, even if German and Japanese militarism was defeated, Western imperialism would resurface and reassert in Asia. And thus their common cause with Indian communists.That was the 1940s. By the 1970s Jerry joined Europe’s ‘God That Failed’ generation. He continued to see hope in Asia. The Vietnam war had kindled that hope. On that 1990 evening China was not yet on our minds, even though the Tiananmen stand-off had disappointed us.I was prompted to finally narrate Jerry’s story about the American shadow, looking at how a long shadow is being cast once again on Indian thinking about the world. In my youth we called them ‘foreign agents’. I believe now they are fashionably referred to as ‘influencers’. There was a time we could name their platforms. We would say without hesitation, ‘So and so is funded by KGB. That one is a CIA agent.’ Magazines, journals, editors and columnists could be identified as such.It was the Cold War era and the key protagonists were the United States and the Soviet Union. Popular myths took concrete shape. People would say, quite nonchalantly, that Prime Minister Morarji Desai was a CIA asset or that senior Congress ministers were receiving funds from the KGB. These days the players are many. The CIA is still around, KGB lives with another name. Then there are MI6 and Mossad and the Chinese must have some outfit too. Everyone is swinging in what geopolitical analysts call ‘the swing state’.The foreign hand has been around forever and many shadows linger. Yet, no one has written a book like Natarajan’s, casting light on foreign influence operations in India. Natarajan was an Indian, a communist and a patriot, his accomplice an American. Today one does not know who is an Indian and who an American the way many Indians and the so-called Indian Americans seek to interpret the world and its events.In December 1990, a few weeks after I met Jerry, I was at a conference on India at the University of Texas at Austin. My paper was on US-India relations in the early years after Indian independence and I, naturally, quoted from Natarajan’s book. During the coffee break the distinguished American scholar on South Asia, Leo Rose, walked up to me. How was I so confident about Natarajan’s claim that some American had helped Natarajan with information for his book?I was pleased that Rose had heard of the book. Of course, he had, he remonstrated. It was all bunkum! But he wanted to know the names of Americans who helped Natarajan. I kept a discrete silence. I chose not to reveal Jerry’s identity. The matter ended there.I wrote to Jerry about my encounter with Rose. He was amused and couldn’t care less. He was by then a well-heeled gentleman, a global expert on sugar, living in a lovely London home, drinking Barbadian rum and smoking a pipe. Alas, not a Cuban cigar.Sanjaya Baru is an author, former newspaper editor and former adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.