The evening before Bush signed off the plans, Black and a handful of other senior CIA officers went to the British embassy in Washington, where they told senior British intelligence officers what was about to happen. At the end of Black‘s three-hour presentation, his opposite number at MI6, Mark Allen, commented drily that it all sounded „rather blood-curdling“. Allen also expressed concern that once the Americans had „hammered the mercury in Afghanistan“, al-Qaida would simply scatter across south Asia and the Middle East, destabilising entire regions.