GREENE, GRAHAM• 223GREENE, GRAHAM.Novelist Graham Greene’s career as aSecret
Intelligence Service(SIS) officer was, as he admitted, wholly undis-
tinguished. Soon after the release of his magnificentThe Power and
the Glory, he was invited to move from the Ministry of Information
to join his sister Elizabeth in SIS. Elizabeth, who had married Rod-
ney Dennys, was also responsible for obtaining a similar transfer for
Malcolm Muggeridge. While Muggeridge encountered no difficulty
in joining SIS, Greene’s application was complicated by an adverse
MI5dossier, which correctly reported that he had bankrupted a mag-
azine by losing an expensive libel action to Shirley Temple, the
American child star whom he accused of being sexually provocative.
Graham’s original appointment in 1941 was toSection V, the sig-
nals intelligence exploitation unit based in St. Albans where his
friendKim Philbyanalyzed intercepted enemy wireless messages
and distributed them to the appropriate SIS stations in Spain, Portu-
gal, and North Africa. Following his work in the Iberian subsection,
Greene was sent to West Africa, where he languished in a villa over-
looking Freetown’s harbor until his recall to London in 1944.
While in Sierra Leone, Greene wroteThe Ministry of FearandThe
Heart of the Matterbut, despite the prewar success ofBrighton Rock,
he was still uncertain about his financial future and in 1944 signed
a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for a series of film scripts,
including his hugely successfulThe Third Man. During this period,
he sketched a treatment entitledNobody to Blameabout Richard
Tripp, the SIS head of station in an unnamed prewar Baltic capital.
The intended director for the film was Alberto Cavalcanti, who sub-
mitted the idea to the British Board of Film Censors, which rejected
the idea with the rebuke that ‘‘they could not grant a certificate to a
film making fun of the Secret Service.’’ Ten years later Greene was
to take his revenge withOur Man in Havana, a splendid spoof of
SIS, but one which nearly landed him in trouble.
There is no censorship for novels but I learnt later that MI5 suggested to
MI6that they should bring an action against the book for a breach of offi-
cial secrets. What secret had I betrayed? Was it the possibility of using bird
shit as a secret ink? But luckily C, the head of MI6, had a better sense
of humor than his colleague in MI5, and he discouraged him from taking
action.