Editing Our Man in Havana (section)

== Background ==
Greene joined MI6 in August 1941.<ref>Christopher Hawtree. [https://www.theguardian.com/news/1999/feb/10/guardianobituaries "A Muse on the tides of history: Elisabeth Dennys"]. ''The Guardian'', 10 February 1999. Retrieved 16 April 2011.</ref><ref>{{Cite web|author=Robert Royal|author-link=Robert Royal (author)|url=http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=3226|title=The (Mis)Guided Dream of Graham Greene|work=[[First Things]]|date=November 1999|access-date=2 June 2010|archive-date=30 September 2008|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080930224500/http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=3226|url-status=dead}}</ref><ref>{{cite news|url=https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/documentaries/features/graham-greene.shtml |title=BBC – BBC Four Documentaries – Arena: Graham Greene |work=BBC News  |date=3 October 2004 |access-date=2 June 2010}}</ref> In London, Greene had been appointed to the subsection dealing with counter-espionage in the [[Iberian Peninsula]], where he had learnt about German agents in Portugal relaying fictitious reports to their superiors, which garnered them expenses and bonuses to add to their basic salary.<ref name="Hulme">Peter Hulme, University of Essex: [https://web.archive.org/web/20120617014603/https://culturalstudies.ucsc.edu/EVENTS/Spring09/Hulme-NWIG.pdf ''Graham Greene And Cuba: Our Man in Havana?'' An analysis]. Retrieved 31 August 2011</ref>

One of the agents was "[[Juan Pujol (alias Garbo)|Garbo]]", a Spanish double agent in [[Lisbon]], who gave his German handlers [[disinformation]], by pretending to control a ring of agents all over England. In fact, he invented armed forces movements and operations from maps, guides and standard military references. Garbo was the main inspiration for Wormold, the protagonist of ''Our Man in Havana''.<ref>[[Denis Smyth|Smyth, Denis]], "Our Man in Havana, Their Man in Madrid: Literary Invention in Espionage Fact and Fiction", ''Spy Fiction, Spy Films and Real Intelligence'', ([[Wesley K. Wark]], ed.), London: Frank Cass, 1991, pp. 117–135.</ref>

Remembering the German agents in Portugal, Greene wrote the first version of the story in 1946, as an outline for a film script, with the story set in [[Estonia]] in 1938. The film was never made, and Greene soon realised that Havana, which he had visited several times in the early 1950s, would be a much better setting, with the absurdities of the [[Cold War]] being more appropriate for a comedy.<ref name="Hulme"/>