Our Man In Havana: by Graham Greene.

If someone is willing to pay for a commodity and desperate to believe it exists, and the pay depends on the excess of its existence, it will be manufactured by fraud if necessary.

This book does not predate the happenings in post war Germany when US occupational authorities and their masters back home were willing to pay and forgive - even reinstate - nazi men in authority of yore, for sake of co-operation in cold war against Soviets, all of which resulted in Germans putting back all the nazis in place and inflating information against Soviets by hundredfold routinely, often manufacturing the figures, which in turn resulted in an escalation of arms race that cost poor people of both nation in terms of education and health, not to mention world's poor in terms of food, since exorbitant quantities were spent on arms never to be used but only to posture and to threaten.

The book does not predate any of this, but the happenings in Europe which went on for a few decades, but is written towards the beginning of it all when the pattern was established, and has the story set in Havana where similar events are set, a poor businessman this time single-handedly causing much trouble out of nothing due to paymasters from across the sea who are all too willing to believe any atrocious lies that go according to their imagination and not the facts.