![]() ![]() He makes a game case, but some readers might conclude that coincidence is a more apt judgment than prescience. In “Our Man Down in Havana” Mr Hull argues that, as well as drawing on his secret-service experience to describe the bumbling nature of much intelligence work, Greene was eerily prophetic about the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which arose when reconnaissance flights proved that the Soviet Union was constructing missile sites on the island. In reality they have been adapted from diagrams of vacuum cleaners. His masterstroke is a report of strange goings-on in the mountains, which he backs up with what are supposedly aerial photographs of sinister constructions. ![]() ![]() Learning that the more information he provides the greater his remuneration, he invents a network of agents and increasingly farcical intelligence, to the delight of his minders in London. The protagonist is James Wormold, a vacuum-cleaner salesman recruited by the British secret service. These half-baked efforts were worthy of his own comic novels, of which “Our Man in Havana”-published just months before the revolution-may be the best loved. ![]()
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