Hitler's Man in Havana: Heinz Luning and Nazi Espionage in Latin America

7. Graham Greene's Man in Havana

141  7  Graham Greene’s Man in Havana Lüning was reincarnated fifteen years later in the guise of James Wormold , Great Britain’s and Graham Greene’s “man in Havana.” Graham Greene, who served in MI6 and shared responsibility for oversight of British counterespionage in the Caribbean in 1943 and 1944, apparently drew on the importance assigned to Lüning and the large volume of material about him when he wrote the 1958 Our Man in Havana. A brief sketch of Greene’s novel should allow the reader to discern similarities between Heinz August Lüning and Wormold, Greene’s fictional Anglican British resident in Havana and MI6 spy. The novel is set in the 1950s. Wormold, a quiet and inactive resident of the city, owns a vacuum cleaner agency. Although his wife has left him, he had promised to raise their teenage daughter as a Catholic. The girl is expensive to manage. Wormold is faced with an ominous financial burden—she wants a horse, and that entails a sizable monthly stable bill, at the Havana Country Club, no less. Suddenly, and despite the fact that he apparently has no background in intelligence work, Wormold is offered the opportunity to supplement his income with a handsome salary and expenses as MI6’s man in Havana . Even more amazingly, he is expected to recruit subagents, who will naturally get salaries and expenses. Wormold stands before a gold mine. 142 Hitler’s Man in Havana A string of nonexistent agents and their varied fictional expenses and real bonuses for good work (the good work leaps from the inventive mind of Wormold only) could solve his financial woes. Soon under pressure to do something beyond routine reports, he traces an outline of vacuum cleaner parts that he reports as the product of dangerous work, undertaken in the eastern mountains of Cuba, by one of his subagents. His stock and that of his subagents ratchets up when these drawings are interpreted as exposing an ominous enemy-secret-weapon site. The bonuses for such excellent work shoot into the stratosphere. This cheery and cheeky story has a downside. This success induces Britain’s (unspecified) enemies to eliminate Wormold’s agents. The inexperienced Wormold had borrowed the names of real people. These poor souls begin to die or suffer attacks under mysterious circumstances. Ultimately , the agents of the unnamed evil power are eliminated. Wormold’s deception is exposed, however, and he is recalled to London. MI6’s director is unable to discipline Wormold because that would demonstrate the incompetence and gullibility of the leadership. The only way out is to present Wormold with the Order of the British Empire and make him an instructor in the MI6 training school. He will teach new agents how to run a station abroad. Both the SIS’s investigation and Greene’s story describe supposedly master spies who ultimately wavered between disinterest and incompetence . Lüning’s spy experience served in some way as a model for Wormold. The large, varied body of evidence to support this contention is essentially circumstantial. There are numerous similarities in the two characters and their stories. There is little direct evidence because Greene wrote little specifically about his MI6 service. He did acknowledge , however, that Our Man in Havana drew on his experience with MI6. In this light, the variety of circumstances, plot and character similarities , and numerous details that Wormold and Lüning shared have additional force in convincing the reader. Greene should have known a great deal about Lüning’s adventure. He claimed that his three years of MI6 experience, especially the fifteen months’ service in London at the Portugal desk (which oversaw the New World), involved reading file, after file, after file. One of the larger files, Graham Greene’s Man in Havana 143 mostly from FBI-SIS’s counterspies, but also from MI6’s Havana agent, would have dealt with Lüning’s case. These files supplied Greene with material for Our Man in Havana: “So it was that experiences in my little shack in Freetown [in 1942 and early 1943] recalled in a more comfortable room off St. James’s [at the Portugal desk] gave me the idea of what twelve years later became Our Man in Havana.”1 Thus, Greene’s work at the Portugal desk helped him write about Wormold. There is no reason why any scholar who has analyzed Greene or Our...