Less than half a mile away Bennett was enduring a similar conversation with Hugh Hoffman in his office on the fourth floor of the US embassy. Similar in subject but not in tone.

‘You’re a damn embarrassment,’ Hoffman shouted, loud enough for most of the rest of the building to hear.

Bennett had never been in Michael Finney’s office when he’d been the London COS and she’d worked down in the embassy’s sub­terranean archives, but she knew it had been relatively modest, at the back of the fourth floor that the CIA occupied entirely, and just large enough for his desk and a small meeting table. Hoffman, however, had taken over one of the large, glass-walled conference rooms that looked out over Grosvenor Square as his personal dominion. No one could cross the fourth floor without passing his expansive office and seeing what was going on inside, and being seen themselves—a tactic by Hoffman to remind everyone who worked for him that he was the boss, and that he was always watching them.

‘I couldn’t know that was going to happen,’ Bennett said.

For twenty minutes she’d been trying to defend herself whenever Hoffman stopped his tirade to catch his breath. Hoffman was a large man with a thick Tennessee accent. He had the kind of voice that sounded like it was permanently angry, and he usually was. If it wasn’t for the change of scenery, Bennett could have been back in Santo Domingo, arguing with Gibson.

‘He’s an enemy asset. You didn’t think he was going to make a run for it as soon as he could?’ Hoffman replied.

Hoffman was also, uncommonly for a high-ranking CIA officer, extremely open about his politics. He was a red-blooded Republican who thought Kennedy had been too timid with Castro and Khrushchev, and that President Johnson should be spending even more of his time and the federal budget fighting communism abroad instead of being distracted by his so-called ‘war on poverty’ at home.

‘The British aren’t our enemy,’ Bennett said, more than a little astounded that she was having to defend America’s relationship with one of its most important and closest allies to a CIA chief of station.

‘Everyone is our enemy,’ Hoffman said. ‘The only difference is how much. This might be their backyard, but I’m not about to let them forget who’s really in charge around here. The Brits have been dragging their heels for years, letting their country get infested with Reds. It’s like they forgot what we fought the war for, or that they still owe us for bailing them out.’

Bennett forced herself not to correct Hoffman about the geo­politics of World War Two, or get sucked into more debate about Cold War allegiances.

‘And now they’ve invited the damned chairman of the Council of Ministers to swan about London while Wilson fawns over him.’