Jim Wormold, a vacuum cleaner salesman, is short of money, his 17-year-old daughter has reached an expensive age and so he accepts Hawthorne's offer of $300-plus a month and becomes Agent 59200/5, MI6's man in Havana. To keep the job, Wormold pretends to recruit sub-agents and sends fake stories, but these stories start to becoming disturbingly true. Based on the novel by Graham Greene, this was the final collaboration between him and director Carol Reed, whom had previously worked together on The Third Man and Fallen Idol.