Our Man in Havana
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Our Man In Havana (1958) is a novel by British author Graham Greene. It was adapted into a movie in 1959, directed by Carol Reed and starring Alec Guinness.
Background
In August 1941, Graham Greene joined the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS or MI6). An interesting sidelight of Greene's tenure in the SIS is the story of Garcia: a double agent in Lisbon, who fed the Germans disinformation, pretending to control a ring of agents all over England, while all he was doing was inventing armed forces movements and operations from maps, guides and standard military references. Garcia was the inspiration for Wormold, a character in Our Man In Havana. Greene supposedly left the service in May 1944, although he continued to supply them with information until his death.Plot
The novel is set in pre-Castro Cuba. James Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman, meets Hawthorne, who offers him work for the British secret service. Wormold lives alone (his wife has left him for another man) with his teenage daughter, Milly. Since Wormold does not make enough money to grant all his daughter's wishes, he decides to take the offer. For lack of any real information to send the secret service, Wormold begins to deceive them by claiming that he has a network of agents, who actually are people that he knows only by sight. He carries his reports to extremes by sending his clients in London a circuit diagram of a vacuum cleaner, telling them that this is a sketch of a secret rocket launching-ramp. In London nobody except Hawthorne, who alone knows that Wormold sells vacuum cleaners, doubts this report. Nevertheless Hawthorne does not tell his boss about his doubts. To help Wormold the secret service sends him a secretary, Beatrice Severn, and other assistants.
Beatrice has to contact his "agent" Raul. To avoid this, Wormold lies that Raul is on the way to take more photos of the rocket launchramp. Wormold soon learns that a pilot named Raul had had an accident and died on the way to the airport. Beatrice and Wormold have to save the other supposed agents because there was an assassination attempt on doctor Cifuentes (also a "spy"). Meanwhile, London finds out that the other side wants to kill Wormold during a trade association meeting. They are going to poison him. Wormold succeeds in unmasking the enemy spy, and spills the whiskey that had been poisoned.
Wormold has to get the list of names of the other enemy spies. Captain Segura, who wants to marry Milly, is in possession of it. Wormold gets Segura drunk in a game of checkers where bottles of Scotch and whiskey are the game pieces. The captain falls asleep and Wormold takes his gun and a microphoto of the list. He wants to take revenge on Carter and kills him at night with Segura's weapon. Wormold sends the photo to London but it is overexposed.
Hawthorne and the secret service find out about the deception. Beatrice who has also learnt the truth, is summoned to London, as well as Wormold. In spite of his invented sketch he is decorated with "the medal of the British Empire". Wormold and Beatrice want to marry and Milly agrees.
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