The Parallel Universe

Townsend doing fluff and fold. What an image!

Let's look at what lies on the ground at the time of Embassy Laundry:

Wiki says:

UK prime minister Winston Churchill and the Eisenhower administration decided in early 1953 to overthrow Iran's government, though the preceding Truman administration had opposed a coup, fearing the precedent that Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) involvement would set.[18]: 3  British intelligence officials' conclusions and the UK government's solicitations were instrumental in initiating and planning the coup, despite the fact that the U.S. government in 1952 had been considering unilateral action (without UK support) to assist the Mosaddegh government.


IIRC, Turkey was somehow involved in passing intelligence.

A young Twignsnapper (he lied about his age to joined the British Special forces during the war) arrives on the family scene.

And Townsend and Jo are fully occupied in a service business for the Embassy Row diplomatic corps. It was a lovely laundry, Linda said, worthy of its elite clients, with an aquarium on the front/back divider wall, and comfortable leather chairs out front.

No, Townsend was not "doing science" then. My guess is that he had been, rather suddenly, pulled into a counterespionage job for the CIA.

As an addendum to the above:

Turkey sits on the Black Sea, with Russia to her north and Iran to her south. One of the British and American concerns around the 1953 Iranian coup was what Russia's response would be. Turkey was in the ideal spot for gathering information from both sides.

In 1955, the U2 overflights of Russia began scooping up electronic signals from one end of the country to the other. They maintained radio silence while in Russian airspace, but opened on the faucets as soon as they were out of it. Somebody made sure that there were catchbuckets at all the exit points. Turkey and Iran were both prime bucket locations.