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CHAPTER 12

THE QUIET ENGLISHMAN

“REDS’ TIME BOMBS RIP SAIGON CENTER: MISSILES KILL 2 AND Injure 30 in Spectacular Viet Minh Strike in Indo-China.” So blared the headline in The New York Times of January 10, 1952. Later newspaper issues raised the dead to eight Vietnamese and two Frenchmen, and thirty-two injured.

Reporter Tillman Durdin had the story: “Agents here of the Viet Minh forces this forenoon staged one of the most spectacular and destructive single incidents in the long history of revolutionary terrorism in Saigon. Two time bombs were exploded at 11 o’clock in the crowded center of two main downtown squares, killing two persons and injuring thirty. Thirteen automobiles were blasted and burned, walls were pitted, windows knocked out, and plaster jarred loose in buildings all around the scene of the explosions.”

The bombs had been left in two parked cars, Durdin continued. One blast went off at the Place de Théâtre, which was overlooked by the Opera House, the Continental Hotel, and a complex of shops and offices. The other blast occurred in the square in front of the City Hall, a block away. The two explosions occurred within two minutes of each other, and the police determined that the two automobiles, each bearing false license plates, had been driven up and parked only a short time before the bombs went off. The perpetrators had had time to flee the scene before the explosions occurred.

Life magazine published a photograph of the Place de Théâtre taken immediately after the explosion, and described the scene:

At 11 o’clock  …   a powerful bomb planted by the Viet Minh Communists, exploded in the trunk of an auto parked in the crowded, busy square. The bomb blew the legs from under the man in the foreground and left him bloody and dazed, propped up on the tile sidewalk with his broken left ankle twisted beneath him. It killed the driver of the  …   delivery truck as he sat at the wheel. It riddled and set fire to the truck, made a torch of a cloth-topped jeep, smashed and burned more autos and raked the square with fragments and flame.

Almost immediately doubts emerged that the attacks were the work of the Viet Minh. Their preferred terrorist methods were different: hand grenades thrown from a bicyclist or rolled down a movie aisle, or point-blank shootings, execution-style. To Donald Heath, the U.S. minister, this merely meant the Viet Minh had shifted tactics. “While feat selected is less [an] exhibition of strength than of VM willingness to indulge in cowardly and brutal acts of terrorism,” he cabled Washington, “exploit was carried out with grim efficiency and will undoubtedly be heralded as Commie triumph.” But veteran journalists thought someone else must be the culprit, as did the French Sûreté. Speculation turned to Colonel Trinh Minh Thé, a flamboyant former Cao Dai chief of staff who had broken with the French in 1951 and, together with twenty-five hundred Cao Dai troops, had set up a headquarters in a swampy area past Tay Ninh near the Cambodian border. His aim: to fight both the French and the Viet Minh, since any authentic nationalism had to oppose both sides. He would be a “Third Force.” In radio broadcasts, Thé’s operatives took credit for the January 9 blasts, and French officials concluded that he was indeed responsible.

General Thé. The Third Force. A bomb blast in a crowded Saigon square. To readers of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American— or viewers of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s or Philip Noyce’s movie version— it all sounds familiar. Each features prominently in the novel. Greene was away from the city on the day of the explosions but he would soon return, his Vietnam stay now into its third month. He had loved the country— and more particularly, its women— from the start, from his first brief stop in early 1951 on his way home to England from Malaya (which he liked far less). He had come then at the encouragement of his friend A. G. Trevor-Wilson, the British consul in Hanoi. “I drained a magic potion,” Greene later said, “a loving cup which I have shared since with many retired colons and officers of the Foreign Legion, whose eyes light up at the mention of Saigon and Hanoi.

“The spell was cast,” Greene went on, “by the tall elegant girls in white silk trousers; by the pewter evening light on flat paddy fields, where the water buffaloes trudged fetlock-deep with a slow primeval gait; by the French perfumeries in the rue Catinat, the Chinese gambling houses in Cholon; above all by the feeling of exhilaration which a measure of danger brings to the visitor with a return ticket: the restaurants wired against grenades, the watchtowers striding along the roads of the southern delta with their odd reminders of insecurity: ‘Si vous êtes arrêtes ou attaqués en cours de route, prévenez le chef du premier poste important.’ ”

Greene would frequently remark on Vietnam’s stunning geography, but that wasn’t what drew him in. His explanation for his Malaya sojourn applied equally well to Vietnam: “Nature doesn’t really interest me— except in so far as it may contain an ambush— that is, something human.” As an uncommonly bored schoolboy, Greene is said to have played Russian roulette, to have had a kind of death wish; perhaps he never changed. He was drawn mothlike to “the exciting thing,” to physical danger, to societies in the throes of violent upheaval. In Ways of Escape, his otherwise reticent autobiography, he acknowledged that he traveled to the revolutions and wars of the colonial world “not to seek material for novels but to regain the sense of insecurity which I had enjoyed in the three blitzes on [wartime] London.” To his brother Hugh, he revealingly expressed disappointment in mid-1951 that he had not been present during Vo Nguyen Giap’s attack on Phat Diem that spring.

His base of operations was Saigon’s best hotel, the luxurious Majestic, built in 1928 according to French design and offering fabulous views of both the rue Catinat and the Saigon River from its fourth-floor rooftop bar. Here he heard the pianist play the latest hits from Paris and saw the sampans floating by on the river below. On occasion, the tracer fire from besieged French posts across the river arced across the evening sky. He also spent time at an apartment a little farther up rue Catinat, at number 109, which today is the Mondial, an unassuming hotel. In between the two stands a building that was the setting for Fowler’s apartment in the novel and now occupies the elegant Grand Hotel. Greene liked to take daily walks along this thoroughfare, stopping as the mood struck for a vermouth cassis at the Palais Café (where, in the novel, Fowler plays quatre-cent-vingt-et-un with Lieutenant Vigot of the Sûreté), or at Givral’s confectionary shop, or at the rooftop café of the Continental Hotel, whose proprietor, Monsieur Franchini, was an affable opium-smoking Corsican known to import prostitutes directly from Paris.

The Pearl of the Far East had begun to lose its luster, to look faded and feel gritty, but that only added to the city’s allure for Greene, who reveled in the atmosphere. He stayed out late at restaurants like l’Amiral, a favorite spot of French parachutists and special operations types, and the Arc-en-Ciel on rue des Marins in the Cholon district, with its Chinese food and its upstairs nightclub featuring a Filipino band and floor shows headlined by the likes of Josephine Baker and Charles Trenet, and a bartender whose gin fizz was famous all over the Far East. He developed a taste for opium, boasting in one letter that he managed to smoke five pipes in a night; in later years he would devote many hours during his Vietnam visits to taking the drug. 8 And he sought out prostitutes, notably at Le Parc aux Buffles (Park of Buffalo; in the novel, The House of 500 Girls), reputed to be the world’s largest brothel, with four hundred women of various nationalities. The vast complex was surrounded by a wall and contained separate sections for officers and ordinary soldiers.

Greene described a visit in his journal: “After hours. The huge courtyard with the girls sitting in groups. The little lighted rooms. Strolled around. Enormous bonhomie. The Fr. police post inside the brothel. The girl stretched across two pairs of knees. The white elegant legs crossed under the light. Price asked 30 pesetas— 8/ 6d. Then directed to officers’ brothel. Much less attractive place, though better girls. To go inside would have made getting out difficult. Price 300 pesetas.”

II

GREENE ARRIVED IN VIETNAM IN OCTOBER 1951, SOON AFTER THE publication of one of his masterpieces, The End of the Affair, and having just that week graced the cover of Time. (“ The next Dostoevsky,” the magazine called him.) He had not come with the intention of writing a novel on the war. He was on assignment from Time’s sister publication, Life, whose publisher, Henry Luce, and editor Emmet John Hughes had been impressed with an evocative— and staunchly anti-Communist— piece Greene had written for the magazine on the insurgency in Malaya. They commissioned him to write one also on the Indochina struggle. He wasted no time getting into the action, joining a French bombing squadron on an operation in Tonkin mere days after his arrival. “I went on two missions,” he wrote his son Francis.

The first was to bomb & machine gun round a town which the Communists had captured. My aircraft went alone. Tiny little cockpit, just room for the pilot (who was also the gunner & bomber), the navigator & me— an hour’s flight each way & then three quarters of an hour over the objective. We did 14 dives. It was most uncomfortable, coming rapidly & steeply down from 9000 to 3000 feet. You were pressed forward in your seat & then as you zoomed up again your stomach was pressed in. I began to get used to it after about four dives. Coming back we went down to about 200 feet & shot up a sampan on the Red River.…

It’s very hot & difficult to write letters, so would you let Mummy see this one if you think she’d be interested in bombing!

Greene returned to the scene in The Quiet American, inserting details he spared his son: “Down we went again, away from the gnarled and fissured forest towards the river, flattening out over the neglected rice fields, aimed like a bullet at one small sampan on the yellow stream. The cannon gave a single burst of tracer, and the sampan blew apart in a shower of sparks; we didn’t even wait to see our victims struggling to survive, but climbed and made for home.” Fowler found the action troubling: “There had been something so shocking in our sudden fortuitous choice of prey— we had just happened to be passing, one burst only was required, there was no one to return our fire, we were gone again, adding our little quota to the world’s dead.”

Greene also paid an early return visit to Phat Diem, sixty-five miles southeast of Hanoi, not far from the sea, where the Catholic bishop, Le Huu Tu, ruled his diocese like a medieval prince and had his own small army. Himself a Catholic, Greene was fascinated by the bishop and by Phat Diem, with its looming cathedral. Here again his own experience, as recorded in his journal, tracks closely with Fowler’s. Like Greene, Fowler accompanies a small group of legionnaires on patrol; like him, he comes across a gruesome scene. “The canal was full of bodies,” Fowler narrates. “I am reminded now of an Irish stew containing too much meat. The bodies overlapped: one head, seal-gray, and anonymous as a convict with a shaven scalp, stuck out of the water like a buoy. There was no blood: I suppose it had flowed away a long time ago. I have no idea how many there were: they must have been caught in a cross-fire, trying to get back.”

The idea for a novel was already now taking hold in Greene’s mind. A key moment was a trip to the province of Ben Tre, forty miles southwest of Saigon. In charge in Ben Tre was Jean Leroy, a Catholic Eurasian (his father was French, his mother Vietnamese) who had taken part in the pacification efforts under Leclerc. Now a colonel in the French Army, Leroy achieved a modest amount of success against the Viet Minh using a militia recruited largely among Catholics. His conviction that success in the war effort depended primarily on winning the popular backing of the peasantry impressed Greene, as did the efforts Leroy had made in that direction: He instituted a system of local elections for a consultative assembly, and he cut the land rents for tenants in the province by half. Nor did Greene mind that Leroy had a flair for entertaining: On an island in a lake, he ordered built a bar lit all night by neon lights. To the apparent delight of guests (or at least Greene), he poured brandy down the throats of women and played the theme music from the movie version of Greene’s The Third Man on the gramophone.

One night in Ben Tre, Greene shared a room with Leo Hochstetter, an American serving as public affairs director for the Economic Aid Mission. By Greene’s own telling, Hochstetter was more intelligent and less innocent than the Alden Pyle character in The Quiet American, and more gregarious, but there’s little doubt that he was a main inspiration for the novel’s title character. (Later it would become conventional wisdom that Pyle was modeled on Edward Lansdale, whom we shall encounter in due course and who would become a champion of Trinh Minh Thé, but Greene did not meet Lansdale until after completing much of the novel.) The two men drove together back to Saigon, as Pyle and Fowler do in the novel, and the American lectured Greene on the necessity of creating a Third Force in Vietnam, one beholden neither to the French nor to Ho Chi Minh. Hochstetter even had a candidate in mind: General Thé.

In the novel, which is set in early 1952 and which Greene began writing in March of that year (some of it while ensconced in room 214 at the Continental), Pyle likewise is attached to the Economic Aid Mission. A clean-cut young Bostonian “impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance,” he brims with references to The Challenge to Democracy and The Role of the West, written by his fictional hero York Harding, a political theorist partial to abstractions. “York wrote that what the East needed was a Third Force,” Pyle tells Fowler at one point. Later, Fowler hears from his assistant:

“I heard [Pyle] talking the other day at the party the Legation was giving to visiting Congressmen.… “

He was talking about the old colonial powers— England and France, and how you couldn’t expect to win the confidence of the Asiatics. That was where America came in with clean hands.… “

Then someone asked him some stock question about the chances of the Government here ever beating the Viet Minh and he said a Third Force could do it. There was always a Third Force to be found free from Communism and the taint of colonialism— national democracy he called it; you only had to find a leader and keep him safe from the old colonial powers.”

To many readers of the novel, Pyle seems singularly naïve, but his views on the Third Force are not really at odds with what many actual U.S. officials felt at the time. Greene almost certainly heard this line of argument from others besides Hochstetter— including at second hand from bitter French colonial officers. Certainly, we know that Robert Blum, Hochstetter’s boss at the Economic Aid Mission, and Edmund Gullion, Heath’s young deputy at the legation, were sure that the war effort would fail unless the Vietnamese were convinced they were fighting for genuine independence and democracy. The only way to make them so convinced was to build up a genuine nationalist force that was neither pro-Communist nor obligated to France and that could rally the public to its side. Even those Americans who still insisted on the need to back the French— Heath in Saigon, Bruce in Paris, Acheson and Truman in Washington— fully shared the belief that ultimate success in the struggle depended on the emergence of a Vietnamese government possessing sufficient authority to compete effectively with the Viet Minh for the allegiance of the populace. This, as we’ve seen, was the motivation behind Washington’s embrace of the Bao Dai solution in 1947.

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.”

III

MORE THAN ANY OTHER OF GREENE’S NOVELS, THE QUIET AMERICAN contains first-hand 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.

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.”

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.

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.” 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.’  ”

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.

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?

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.”

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

The agent’s emphasis on the timing is important. A few years thence, as we shall see, at about the time the novel was published, U.S. officials were in close contact with Thé and did promote him as someone who could play at least a supporting role in a Third Force movement in Vietnam. In 1954– 55, none other than Edward Lansdale had contact with Thé and worked to keep him supportive of U.S. policy. In one recently declassified memorandum from the period, Lansdale speaks of Thé’s charisma and political strength and calls Thé crucial to achieving America’s aims in Vietnam.

That was later. In February 1952, as he readied to leave Saigon and Vietnam, Graham Greene had yet to begin writing his novel. His Paris Match article would not appear for another five months. But he had already made certain determinations about the Franco– Viet Minh struggle that are of particular interest here. For one thing, Greene’s anti-Communism and sympathy for the French cause did not keep him from appreciating the skill and commitment of the Viet Minh and the corresponding weakness of Bao Dai’s regime, with its chronic tendency toward lassitude and incompetence; he grasped already that France faced long odds against success. For another thing, he saw with his own eyes how entrenched the United States was becoming in the anti– Viet Minh effort (he opens The Quiet American with Fowler seeing “the lamps burning where they had disembarked the new American planes”), and how much friction existed between the Americans and the French, with whom they were ostensibly allied. Greene spent significant time only with one side in this dispute, which no doubt colored his perceptions, but there’s ample additional evidence that in the early months of 1952, relations between French and American officials in Vietnam were more strained than ever.

The seemingly relentless Americanization of South Vietnamese urban culture had something to do with it. More and more, young Saigonese flocked to American films, listened to American popular music, even dressed in the American style they picked up from Hollywood movies— shorts with angled pockets, loose short-sleeved shirts, Bata cotton shoes. Try as colonial officials might to convince themselves and one another that these developments were natural and to be expected, it wasn’t always an easy sell, even if there were also continuities: Privileged Vietnamese still preferred French food and French perfume, still used Français as their second (in some cases first) language, and still thought colons were more generous tippers than Americans.

Howard Simpson, who arrived in Saigon in January 1952 to take up his post as a press officer for the U.S. Information Service, had barely set foot in the city when he experienced firsthand the French mistrust of all things American. At their first encounter, Jean-Pierre Dannaud, the director of the French Information Service, was cool and condescending toward Simpson and fairly oozed resentment at what he considered American interference in the war effort. Simpson initially brushed this tension off as unrepresentative and as stemming from his own lack of experience in the Far East, but he quickly changed his mind. It dawned on him, he later wrote, that “the two so-called allies saw the future of the Indochinese peninsula from entirely different optics.” True, Harry Truman and his top advisers in Washington preached the need to back the anti– Viet Minh struggle, and they matched their rhetoric by sending more and more aid to the French; also true, Donald Heath insisted in his first meeting with Simpson that France was “fighting the good fight” and as such deserved the legation’s full support. But neither these high-level convictions nor the diplomatic language and soothing official declarations offered by both sides could mask, Simpson determined, the mutual suspicions and growing rivalry.

He got a fuller taste of that rivalry as soon as he ventured into the field. Although the French High Command had final say on the distribution of American military matériel, a stipulation in the bilateral agreement allowed the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) to make suggestions regarding that distribution. In addition, MAAG had the right to conduct “end-use” inspections in the field to determine how the U.S.-supplied equipment was being utilized. Simpson’s office, meanwhile, had the task of publicizing the aid program’s effectiveness in the United States and abroad. He consequently accompanied the end-use missions— or, as U.S. officials came to call them, “end-use charades.” Typically, the visits would take months to schedule, due to “operational requirements” claimed by the French. On the appointed day, French drivers would arrive hours behind schedule and then inexplicably get lost en route to the post. When at last the U.S. officers arrived on scene, they would be told that for “security reasons” the inspection would be limited to service and support units. An elaborate lunch table would be laid for them, with four courses, red and white wine, and cognac toasts offered by the senior French officer present. When Simpson and his colleagues at last emerged into the afternoon sun, it would be too late to visit the outlying posts.

“The flowery mess toasts may have referred to ‘our gallant American allies,’ Lafayette, and the Normandy landings,” Simpson recalled, “but to a majority of the French, both military and civilian, we were ‘Les Amerloques,’ a derogatory slang phrase for ‘crazy Americans.’ They felt we were muscling in on their territory, spreading wild ideas about freedom and independence among the local population, and showing a dangerous tendency toward criminal naïvete in a region we knew little about.” 36 Little wonder Graham Greene in early 1952 found so much to talk about with the French officers in Saigon: “Dangerous” and “criminally naïve” could be Fowler talking about Pyle. Simpson in fact met the novelist on two or three occasions, during which the “aloof and dyspeptic” Greene “made no secret of his basic anti-American feelings” and his misgivings concerning the deepening U.S. involvement in the war. Early on Simpson thought Greene might ask him to help arrange an interview with Donald Heath, but it never happened. The Englishman “remained with his French and Vietnamese contacts, observing the Amerloques at a disdainful distance.” On a later occasion, Simpson and Greene, both of them hungover from a late night of carousing, found themselves seated side by side on an early morning flight to Laos. They exchanged a cool acknowledgment but, Simpson remembered, “it took no great receptivity to sense Greene’s displeasure at being paired with an ‘official’ American.” They passed the flight in silence.

Bemused though he was by the depth of the French mistrust, Simpson acknowledged that the brash behavior of many Americans in Saigon didn’t help. The phrase “ugly American” was not yet in use, but the phenomenon could be observed on any given day. Moving through the streets in their large black sedans and new Jeep station wagons, hitting the bars and restaurants en masse sporting crew cuts and aloha shirts that they left untucked, these Yanks never made a pretense of blending in. Even those who were more low-key and subtle tended to separate themselves from everyone but fellow Americans— a point Congressman John F. Kennedy, it will be recalled, had noted on his visit the previous autumn. Each day Simpson and other Americans from USIS and the Aid Mission met for pre-lunch beers at the Continental’s terrace café, “a symbol of the old colonial Indochina.” He recalled of these sessions: “We were a boisterous group, playing the match game for drinks and laughing loudly at inconsequential jokes, well aware of the disapproving colons who left a cordon sanitaire of empty tables around us.”

“In retrospect,” a rueful Simpson concluded, “I can understand some of the French resentment.”

Greene, for his part, departed Saigon somewhat sadly on February 9. “I left Saigon yesterday— with certain regrets. I had one or two good friends there. Especially during this last stay. Perhaps I’ll write the ‘entertainment’ I thought of and go back and film it one day. People have been nice to me.”


Logevall, Fredrik (2012-08-21). Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam (pp. 293-310). Random House Publishing Group.