Embers of War (50 page)

Even the phrase “Third Force” was in currency that winter as Greene began assembling his notes. The previous summer, in July 1951,
The New Republic
had published an article bearing the title “Viet Nam
Has
a Third Force.” The author, Sol Sanders, recently back in the United States after two years in Southeast Asia, excoriated the French and the Viet Minh with equal gusto but said all was not lost: “Beneath the layers of opportunists, French spies, and hangers-on, there is a hard nucleus of patriots who are fighting for a truly independent, libertarian Viet Nam.” And later: “Bao Dai’s regime, cleansed of the French-supported parasites that now infest it, can still rally to our side the Viet Nam’s people [
sic
] who are sick of war and afraid of Stalinism.”
¹⁸

III

MORE THAN ANY OTHER OF GREENE’S NOVELS,
THE QUIET AMERICAN
contains firsthand reportage, much of it done on this three-and-a-half-month stay in 1951–52. A comparison of the book with his letters home, his journal, and his articles makes this clear. Much of the time he was in Saigon or Hanoi, but occasionally he accompanied French troops into the field. Tall and unarmed, he was an easy target, but he showed complete disregard for his own physical safety, even when at Phat Diem he found himself in the midst of heavy fighting. (This action too features in the novel.) Greene was not at this point pro-Communist, but the talent and fierce dedication of the Viet Minh impressed him. In his article for
Life
, he acknowledged that many of Ho Chi Minh’s supporters were motivated by idealism and were not part of any monolithic Stalinist movement. Even worse from the editors’ perspective, Greene saw little chance of stopping Communism in Indochina. The article urged France to prepare herself for retreat from the region and warned Washington that not all social-political problems could be overcome with force. Hughes and Luce, aghast at this message, rejected the piece, despite the fact that Greene also offered up a crude articulation of the domino theory of the type that Fowler ridicules in the novel. (“If Indo-China falls,” Greene wrote, “Korea will be isolated, Siam can be invaded in twenty-four hours and Malaya may have to be abandoned.”) Thus rebuffed, Greene offered the article to the right-wing
Paris Match
, which published it in July 1952.
¹⁹

Greene concluded the article with a jarringly sentimental tribute to the courage and skill of French soldiers. Maybe he was trying to soften the blow of the impending defeat. But it’s also the case that he retained in 1952 a good measure of sympathy for the French cause, and for European colonialism more generally. He had himself been born into the British Empire’s administrative class, and its worldview and mores continued to imbue him. He could write movingly of Saigon as the “Paris of the East,” and he much enjoyed spending time in the cafés along the rue Catinat in the company of French
colons
and officials. He was indeed in this period something of a Frenchman
manqué
. Castigating the Americans for being “exaggeratedly mistrustful of empires,” Greene said the Old World knew better: “We Europeans retain the memory of what we owe Rome, just as Latin America knows what it owes Spain. When the hour of evacuation sounds there will be many Vietnamese who will regret the loss of the language which put them in contact with the art and faith of the West.”
²⁰

Little wonder that Greene and the
colons
got on so well; they spoke in the same terms regarding all that European colonialism had wrought and the damage the Americans could do. It is ironic, therefore, that some leading French officials mistrusted him. General de Lattre, eager to win more American aid and aware that Greene was in Indochina on assignment from an American magazine, initially went out of his way to woo the novelist, inviting him to informal dinners and giving him the use of a military plane. But the general’s opinion changed after Greene visited Phat Diem and showed keen interest in Bishop Le Huu Tu. De Lattre hated the bishop’s seeming double-dealing, blaming him for his son Bernard’s death near Phat Diem the previous year—the bishop, de Lattre believed, had tacitly allowed the Viet Minh to sneak up on the position Bernard’s unit was defending. In the general’s mind, Greene became a kind of accomplice in the treachery.
²¹

The elder de Lattre became convinced that Greene and his friend in Hanoi, the British consul Trevor-Wilson, were in fact spies, working for the British secret service. He blurted out to the head of the Sûreté: “All these English, they’re too much! It isn’t sufficient that they have a consul who’s in the Secret Service, they even send me their novelists as agents and Catholic novelists into the bargain.”
²²
De Lattre placed both men under Sûreté surveillance and used Vietnamese to assist in the effort. “The French gave us orders to watch Graham Greene very closely,” recalled Pham Xuan An, a self-taught English speaker who was tasked with censoring the Englishman’s dispatches, and who would later lead an extraordinary double life as a
Time
reporter and Viet Cong spy. “While he was in Asia, smoking opium and pretending to be a journalist, the Deuxième Bureau assured us he was a secret agent in MI6, British Intelligence.

“One day,” An continued, “Graham Greene came to the post office to file a story. His report was placed on my desk. It was a long report. ‘What do I do with this?’ I asked my supervisor. ‘You have to be very careful,’ he said. ‘If there are any words you are not sure about, just cross them out. Your English isn’t very good, but there’s nothing he can do about it. He can’t argue with you. So just go ahead and cross out the words. Mark it up and then give it to the man who types the telegram. They never give him a chance to argue anyway.’ ”
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Greene ridiculed the charge that he was engaged in espionage—the whole episode, he later said, was a comic adventure featuring funny little Frenchmen tailing him, a deluded old general, and a jolly companion (Trevor-Wilson) with an estimable knowledge of Chinese massage parlors. But very likely de Lattre had it right. Trevor-Wilson was not only the consul in Hanoi; he also managed the Secret Intelligence Service’s operations in the city. He was, moreover, sympathetic both to the Viet Minh and to fellow Catholic Le Huu Tu’s activities. De Lattre declared Trevor-Wilson persona non grata and forced him to leave Indochina in December 1951. As for Greene, he too likely was on dual assignment in Vietnam—for
Life
as well as for the SIS. He had joined the agency in World War II (he and Trevor-Wilson first became acquainted at SIS headquarters at St. Albans in 1943), having been recruited by his sister, and Greene continued the relationship periodically after the war. The Sûreté felt confident Greene was working for the SIS in Indochina, and his own correspondence hints at it. Most likely, the arrangement was informal; he was a kind of “casual spy,” passing on observations here and there as the mood struck him.
²⁴

Greene’s sympathetic views toward the French cause in Indochina would in time change, but not his negative assessment of the United States. It was set in stone. Even before he visited the country in 1938, on his way to Mexico, America had become for him a symbol of empty materialism, lack of tradition, political immaturity, and cultural naïveté. In his second novel,
The Name of Action
, published in 1930, we find the stereotype of the bad American, in the form of the arms dealer. Now, two decades later, with the onset of the Cold War and the McCarthyite witch hunts, his view grew darker still. How, he wondered, could a people be at once so smugly self-righteous in their conviction that the American way was best for everyone and so obsessively fearful of the Red menace?
²⁵

Fowler, the cynical and world-weary English narrator of
The Quiet American
, boasts at the beginning that he has no politics, but in fact his language is saturated with anti-Americanisms, as he picks up the fight against Pyle’s arrogant naïveté. Bitter experience has taught Fowler that the world is not always changeable, that some problems have no solution, and that certain Western abstractions, such as democracy, don’t necessarily correspond to how society actually functions. Along comes the Ivy League–educated Pyle, ignorant of the world and full of reforming zeal, “determined to do good, not to any individual person but to a country, a continent, a world.” Fowler does not initially see the danger but instead reaches out to shield the American: “That was my first instinct—to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was a greater need to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection, when we should be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world meaning no harm.”
²⁶

Innocence in this context does not mean freedom from guilt. This is the paradox on which
The Quiet American
rests. (We shall return to the novel in a later chapter.) Fowler continues to call Pyle “innocent” even after he determines that the American has been supplying plastic explosives to General Thé for use in terrorist attacks. Pyle never suspects that the world is a messy and complicated place and that people’s motives, including his own, may be more sinister than they seem. In his mind, there are no limits to what the United States can achieve; he is willing—to use the later Vietnam-era phrase—to destroy a village in order to save it. It’s Pyle’s very innocence, that is to say, that makes him dangerous.

IV

IN LATER YEARS, GREENE WOULD INSIST THAT HE HAD GOOD REASON
to believe that the CIA was involved in the actual January 9 bomb attacks. Wasn’t it a little too convenient, he asked in his memoirs, that
Life
happened to have a photographer right there on the scene? “The
Life
photographer at the moment of the explosion was so well placed that he was able to take an astonishing and horrifying photograph which showed the body of a trishaw driver still upright after his legs had been blown off. This photograph was reproduced in an American propaganda magazine published in Manila over the caption ‘The work of Ho Chi Minh,’ although General Thé had promptly and proudly claimed the bomb as his own.” It seems, though, that the
Life
photos were taken not by a staffer but by an enterprising freelance Vietnamese, who sold copies the next day both to the magazine and to two U.S. officials.
²⁷

Nor has any other firm evidence for American involvement in the bombing turned up, though it’s apparent that among French officials (with whom Greene had close contact) there were strong suspicions to that effect. In mid-February, a few days after Greene departed from Vietnam, Minister Heath informed Washington of a French document that had come into his possession: It advocated French military action against Thé but acknowledged there were risks, as Thé was a genuine nationalist. “It expresses fear,” Heath went on, “that reaction would provide U.S. with opportunity [to] strengthen hold on country and … it accuses Thé of responsibility for January 9 explosions and claims explosive devices were provided by U.S.”
²⁸

British officials had their own suspicions. Hubert Graves, consul in Saigon, told the Foreign Office of “strong rumours” that “certain American elements” were involved. He noted that the explosives and clockwork devices used were “much too ingenious” to have been manufactured by the Cao Dai-ists themselves, and that another recent bombing by the group, this one of a major bridge, also used unaccountably advanced technology. “It is known,” Graves continued, “that members of the American official missions in Saigon make frequent visits to the Tay Ninh area and it is unfortunately now widely stated in Saigon that the Americans are behind General Thé.”

Veiled references made by the French to the irresponsible support by the Americans of nationalist groups have, in private conversations with members of my own staff, now become direct accusations that the Americans are providing support to General Thé and his men. Incredible as it may seem, I am afraid that there may be some truth in all this. Members of the American Legation have admitted that their dealings with the sects are bedeviled by their desire to be in a position to use them as the nucleus for guerrilla activity in the event of Indo-China being overrun and it has been suggested that the training and equipment which is being provided for such an eventuality has been put by General Thé to premature use. I conclude this paragraph with considerable reluctance but I can no longer ignore the reports which continue to come in from usually reliable sources.
²⁹

Trinh Minh Thé himself cultivated the view that he had close ties to the Americans. In early March, after the French Expeditionary Corps attacked his private army’s headquarters in Tay Ninh, and some of his soldiers fled, he attempted to boost morale by claiming to have had secret contacts with the Americans that would soon yield a major influx of weapons and cash. He ordered his subordinates to have themselves photographed for the benefit of the U.S. mission in Saigon. When the French attacks resulted in an acute food shortage in the compound, Thé encouraged the rumor that American planes were about to air-drop several tons of rice. He reminded his men that Washington had long supplied the various “sect armies” in Cochin China with money and weapons, using the justification that these armies were officially
supplétifs
of the French military.
³⁰

The American documentary record is silent on whether there were close U.S. dealings with Trinh Minh Thé in early 1952. American officials certainly paid visits to the Tay Ninh area where Thé had his base, but what actually occurred on those trips remains obscure. No evidence has surfaced that U.S. agents supplied his organization with explosives—though that is not always the type of information that would be recorded on paper. Edmund Gullion subsequently denied any direct American connection with Thé at that time, though he was not quite categorical. “The idea of an independent force springing out of the rice paddies was not something we were really concerned with,” he noted. “There were disaffected people, people like [Ngo Dinh] Diem who held themselves aloof from the French for a long time, and we thought they were a more likely independent force [than Thé].” In the same vein, a CIA agent told author Norman Sherry, “To my knowledge, no single agency official was—at that time—in contact with Colonel Thé. And I would know.”
³¹