From Act II, Chapter 3

. . . It's an hour's trip by train from London to Cambridge, a city of one hundred thousand happily dominated by the famous university, with its twenty thousand students and eight centuries of rich history.

This is where Sir Richard Dearlove, a Cambridge graduate himself, landed after he left his post as head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service in the summer of 2004. He became master of Pembroke College, one of the oldest of the thirty-two colleges that make up Cambridge, founded in 1347 and boasting such graduates as William Pitt the younger, Abba Eban, and Monty Python's Eric Idle.

Over the centuries, parts of the college were rebuilt, but the main arch is the original weathered sandstone. It opens onto a cobbled path that leads to a low doorway, and from there it's up one long flight of sloping stairs to Dearlove's office.

This seems like a particularly good place to keep secrets, locked in sandstone. When Dearlove's appointment was announced, Cambridge was quite clear that he wouldn't be doing interviews, and this came as little surprise. Controversies over Britain's role in supporting and joining America's mission in Iraq were beginning to surface regularly by then. Dearlove knew they were bound to get worse. as head of MI6, he was always the invisible man at the table, right next to Tony Blair. . . .

Sir Richard Dearlove was the head of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, until 2004. The Way of the World details Ron Suskind's fateful encounter with Dearlove at Cambridge University which confirmed a highly secret British intelligence-gathering mission that established contact with the head of Iraqi intelligence months prior to the launch of combat operations in 2003.