Wormold sells vacuum cleaners in Havana, has a teenage daughter with expensive tastes, and no money. The British intelligence service recruits him to spy, but having nothing to report, and no spying experience, 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. Headquarters is so thrilled, they send him a secretary and a radio operator for support. Then people who exist only on paper start turning up dead, and the fiction becomes real. Greene had worked for MI6 and wrote Our Man in Havana as farce; surprisingly (or not), its made-up reporting is exactly what happened with the Iraq weapons-of-mass-destruction dossier in the Bush-Cheney years.