3:00 P.M. Greenwich mean time
Lecky and Graves and Howell were even less satisfactory . They could n't pretend even to try what the questioning-teams from the Pentagon wanted them to do . And Betsy remained silent , receiving nothing , and Gus and Al waited meditatively for something to unscramble , and nothing turned up . And then , at 3:00 P.M. Greenwich mean time , on August 9 , 1972 , nearly every operating communicator in the fringe of free nations around the territory of the Union of Communist Republics -- all communicators blew out . There were only four men in the world who really knew why -- Sergeant Bellews and Lecky and Graves and Howell . They knew that somewhere behind the Iron Curtain a twenty-kilowatt transmitter had been turned on . It produced a wave of the type and with the characteristics that would have been produced by a transmitter built from the diagram sent through Betsy and Al and Gus for people in the United States to build .