Wormold sells vacuum cleaners in Havana, has a teenage daughter with expensive tastes, and no money. British intelligence recruits him. Having nothing to report, he invents a network of agents out of the phone book and sends London drawings of vacuum cleaner parts labeled as a secret military installation in the mountains. London is thrilled. They send him a secretary and a radio operator. Then people who exist only on paper start turning up dead, and the fiction becomes true. Greene had worked for MI6 and wrote it as farce, and it turned out to describe the Iraq weapons dossier decades before that happened.
Our Man in Havana