The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  Blum, like Pyle in The Quiet American, was looking for a third force to capture the nationalist interest of the Vietnamese people. He felt that only if the Vietnamese were fighting for democracy and independence would they begin to take a powerful personal interest in defeating the communist Vietminh. Without a third force, he and Gullion both believed the French could not succeed. As Blum said:

  We wanted to strengthen the ability of the French to protect the area against Communist infiltration and invasion, and we wanted to capture the nationalist movement from the Communists by encouraging the national aspirations of the local populations and increasing popular support of their governments. We knew that the French were unpopular, that the war that had been going on since 1946 was not only a nationalist revolt against them but was an example of the awakening self-consciousness of the peoples of Asia who were trying to break loose from domination by the Western world.2

  Blum wanted the United States to be looked upon as a friend to a new nation, not as a supporter of colonialism (that was an anathema to the Americans).

  After visiting Vietnam in 1951, Congressman John F. Kennedy went home to preach the gospel of those forward-looking Americans in the legation. Speaking of how America had allied itself to the desperate effort of the French regime to hang on to the remnants of an empire, Kennedy concluded: ‘the French cannot succeed in Indochina without giving concessions necessary to make the native army a reliable and crusading force.’3 Emperor Bao Dai feared that if the Vietnamese army were expanded into a nationalist army, it might defect en masse to the Vietminh. His tragedy was that he was expressing a truth that initially looked like cynicism.

  Because Bao Dai proved so disappointing the Americans felt they had to find someone who represented the new nationalism, someone who opposed the French, someone without the taint of colonialist power, who was also strongly opposed to the communist Vietminh. Thus Colonel Thé became significant.

  At the time that Greene was visiting Vietnam and beginning to write The Quiet American, Colonel Thé had not yet become important to the Americans. They knew he was small beer, but in the early days of his revolt from the Cao Dai his statements expressed his opposition to both the French and the communists. It was only later, after Dien Bien Phu in 1954 when the French were in the process of leaving Vietnam, that the Americans decided on their third force figure – the Catholic strong man Ngo Dinh Diem, who had spent much of the war in a monastery in New Jersey. The then came into his own by joining forces with Diem. He was brought back out of the jungle to support Diem by Colonel Lansdale with the help of CIA money. To the French The was a murderous reptile: to the ordinary Vietnamese a romantic hero. Howard Simpson, an American writer in Saigon, described overhearing an ‘incongruous melodrama’ (his words) involving General Nguyen Van Vy, a pro-French Bao Dai loyalist and chief of staff of the Vietnamese army, and Colonel Thé:

  Cao Dai general Trinh Minh The, in civilian clothes, is lecturing Vy while armed members of The’s newly formed pro-Diem ‘Revolutionary Committee’ have taken up positions by the doors and windows …

  General Vy is being asked to read a prepared statement calling for an end to French interference in Vietnamese affairs, repudiating Bao Dai, and pledging his loyalty to Ngo Dinh Diem. Vy is responding to The’s harangue in a low voice, trying to argue his case. The veins on The’s forehead are standing out … Suddenly The pulls a Colt .45 from his belt, strides forward, and puts its muzzle to Vy’s temple. Thé pushes Vy to the microphone, the heavy automatic pressed tight against the general’s short-cropped gray hair. I wince, waiting for the Colt’s hammer to fall. The repetitive clicking of a camera is the only sound in the tense silence … Vy begins to read the text into the mike, the paper shaking in his hands. His face is ashen, and perspiration stains his collar. The complains he can’t hear and demands that Vy speak louder. When Vy finishes, The puts his automatic away. General relief sweeps the room.4

  *

  Thé’s influence is central to the plot of The Quiet American. He is the catalyst who reveals Pyle’s ‘special duties’. The’s desperate actions in the novel are based on historical fact. Greene also asserts, both in the novel and in his non-fictional writing, that the CIA was involved with Thé, providing him with the material to carry out nefarious actions. This is what so scandalised Liebling in the New Yorker. ‘There is a difference … between calling your over-successful offshoot a silly ass and accusing him of murder.’5

  In his dedication to René Berval and Phuong, Greene mentioned that he had rearranged historical events: ‘the big bomb near the Continental preceded and did not follow the bicycle bombs. I have no scruples about such small changes.’

  On 25 January 1952 the New York Times reported:

  Saigon, Indo-China, Jan. 21. Seven plastic time bombs, all of them attached to bicycles by Communist terrorists [emphasis added], exploded in the crowded streets here today, injuring twenty-four persons, eight of them seriously.6

  Greene made the incident into a mystery and greatly increased the number of plastic time-bombs. He was in Saigon at the time and his diary entry shows he knew exactly how many time-bombs were planted: he was deliberately making this a humorous episode in the novel:

  Just at that time that the incident occurred of the bicycle bombs … The whole affair … was not worth more than a paragraph, and a humorous paragraph at that. It bore no relation to the sad and heavy war in the north, those canals in Phat Diem choked with the grey days-old bodies, the pounding of the mortars, the white glare of napalm.7

  Fowler’s Indian assistant, who seems to have some contact with the Vietminh, arranges a meeting for him with Mr Heng (clearly a Vietminh agent). Fowler meets Mr Heng after waiting fifteen minutes beside a stall of flowers in the boulevard Charner. A truckload of police drive up with a grinding of brakes and the squeal of rubber from the direction of the Sûreté Headquarters in the rue Catinat:

  the men disembarked and ran for the store, as though they were charging a mob, but there was no mob – only a zareba of bicycles … Before I had time to adjust my camera the comic and inexplicable action had been accomplished. The police had forced their way among the bicycles and emerged with three which they carried over their heads into the boulevard and dropped into the decorative fountain …

  ‘Opération Bicyclette,’ a voice said. It was Mr Heng.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘A practice? For what?’

  ‘Wait a while longer,’ Mr Heng said.8

  Idlers start approaching the fountain where ‘one wheel stuck up like a buoy’ and are stopped by a policeman. Heng examines his watch, the hands standing at four minutes past eleven. Fowler has just time to say that his watch is fast, and for Heng to admit that it always gains:

  And at that moment the fountain exploded over the pavement. A bit of decorative coping struck a window and the glass fell like the water in a bright shower … A bicycle wheel hummed like a top in the road, staggered and collapsed. ‘It must be just eleven,’ Mr Heng said … That day all over Saigon innocent bicycle pumps had proved to contain bombs which had gone off at the stroke of eleven … It was all quite trivial – ten explosions, six people slightly injured and God knows how many bicycles. My colleagues … called it an ‘outrage’ – knew they could only get space by making fun of the affair. ‘Bicycle Bombs’ made a good headline. All of them blamed the Communists. I was the only one to write that the bombs were a demonstration on the part of General Thé …9

  On 25 January 1952, four days after the event, Tillman Durdin of the New York Times came out with the news that it was the dissident Caodaist Colonel Thé who was responsible for planning the incident, and not the communists. A secret memo from Donald Heath to the State Department reads: ‘He [Tran Van Tuyen, secretary of the Phuoc Quoc Hoi nationalist group] told Durdin … “Third Force” had set off second set “exploding bicycles”.’10 A secret agent of the American legation (cover name Pierre) gave further information:

  Pierre states that the bicycle explosio
ns Jan 21 have been definitely traced to Colonel Thé, many of whose men hold regular Cao Daist passes and can enter and leave city without hindrance from security organizations. Source adds that one of Colonel Thé’s majors has been arrested, and revealed everything, including name of Colonel Thé’s pyrotechnical expert. There was the added suspicion that a French colonel who had been a former liaison officer with the Cao Daists had also been arrested under suspicion of complicity in the explosions.11

  A much more serious bomb explosion took place in Saigon on 9 January, two days before de Lattre’s death. The New York Times headline read: ‘RED’S TIME-BOMBS RIP SAIGON CENTER: Missiles Kill 2 and Injure 30 in Spectacular Vietminh Strike in Indo-China.’ Later newspaper issues raised the dead to 8 Vietnamese, 2 Frenchmen, and thirty-two injured. Again Tillman Durdin had the story:

  Agents here of the Vietminh 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 automobiles. One blast went off in the Place de Théâtre, which is overlooked by the Opera House, the Hotel Continental and a complex of stores and office buildings. 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. The police believe that the two cars, which had false license plates, had been driven up and parked only a short time before the bombs went off. The perpetrators of the crime had time to leave the cars and get away safely before the explosions occurred … several arrests were made but the actual carriers of the bombs are believed still at large and the city is being combed for suspects.12

  The French soon relinquished the idea that the bombing was the work of the Vietminh for, as the New York Times reported on 26 January 1952, ‘radio broadcasts from the headquarters of the opposition Caodaists had virtually taken credit for the terrorism’. The French were profoundly angry over Thé’s killing of innocent civilians in the square. General Salan, de Lattre’s successor, asserted that he reserved the execution stake for such as Thé.

  *

  Greene used the bombing near the Continental Palace in The Quiet American (though he made no reference to the second bomb going off simultaneously as it would have complicated his story unnecessarily) and linked Pyle, the CIA undercover man, with Colonel Thé and the bombing. Pyle is providing Thé with plastic explosive for the bombs and, the suggestion is, thé know-how for producing a time-bomb – a method not previously used in terrorist attacks. By suggesting that the American legation knew about Pyle’s connection with and involvement in terrorist activities, Greene turned the incident into an unsavoury episode. Fowler suspects that Pyle is more deeply involved with Thé and his activities than he should be and advises him not to rely on the Colonel:

  Perhaps there is a prophet as well as a judge in those interior courts where our true decisions are made [says Fowler to himself].

  ‘We are the old colonial peoples, Pyle, but we’ve learnt a bit of reality, we’ve learned not to play with matches. This Third Force – it comes out of a book, that’s all. General The’s only a bandit with a few thousand men: he’s not a national democracy’ …

  ‘I don’t know what you mean, Thomas.’

  ‘Those bicycle bombs. They were a good joke, even though one man did lose a foot. But, Pyle, you can’t trust men like Thé. They aren’t going to save the East from Communism. We know their kind.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘The old colonialists.’

  ‘I thought you took no sides.’

  ‘I don’t Pyle, but if someone has got to make a mess of things in your outfit, leave it to Joe. Go home with Phuong. Forget the Third Force.’13

  But Pyle doesn’t forget the third force, as Fowler discovers.

  It is half-past eleven in the morning and Fowler is visiting the Pavilion (in reality La Pagode), the coffee centre for European and American women in rue Catinat. He sees two young, tidy, identically dressed American girls (‘it was impossible to conceive either of them a prey to untidy passion’) sitting at the next table scooping up ice-cream. They finish their ices and one of the young ladies looks at her watch. ‘We’d better be going,’ she says, ‘to be on the safe side.’ The young American girls leave the café, where there is only an old French woman carefully and uselessly making up her face. Suddenly the two mirrors on the wall fly at Fowler and collapse half-way. The dowdy French woman is on her knees in a wreckage of chairs and tables; her compact lies open and unhurt in her lap. The explosion has been so close that Fowler’s eardrums have still to recover from the pressure. He thinks it is another joke bomb like the bicycle bombs, but when he gets into the Place Gamier, he realises by the heavy clouds of smoke that this is no laughing matter:

  The smoke came from the cars burning in the car-park in front of the national theatre, bits of cars were scattered over the square, and a man without his legs lay twitching at the edge of the ornamental gardens. People were crowding in from the rue Catinat, from the Boulevard Bonnard. The sirens of police-cars, the bells of the ambulances and fire-engines came at one remove to my shocked ear-drums.14

  Suddenly Fowler remembers that his ex-girlfriend, Phuong, now living with Pyle, must be in the milk bar across the square, since she always goes there at eleven. He tries to get across, but is stopped by the police. He looks up and sees Pyle and urges him to use his legation pass to cross the square to find her. Pyle insists that she isn’t there, that she isn’t there because he specifically warned her not to be. Fowler remembers the two American girls leaving the coffee shop to be on the safe side and suddenly the pieces fall into place. He realises that the Americans were aware that there was going to be a bomb explosion and Pyle had warned Phuong for the same reason: Pyle was involved in it. Finally they both cross the square to the scene of carnage:

  A woman sat on the ground with what was left of her baby in her lap; with a kind of modesty she had covered it with her straw peasant hat. She was still and silent, and what struck me most in the square was the silence … the only sounds came from those who served, except where here and there the Europeans wept and implored and fell silent again as though shamed by the modesty, patience and propriety of the East. The legless torso at the edge of the garden still twitched, like a chicken which has lost its head. From the man’s shirt, he had probably been a trishaw driver.

  Pyle said, ‘It’s awful.’ He looked at the wet on his shoes and said in a sick voice, ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Blood,’ I said. ‘Haven’t you ever seen it before?’

  He said, ‘I must get them cleaned before I see the Minister.’ I don’t think he knew what he was saying. He was seeing a real war for the first time … I forced him, with my hand on his shoulder, to look around. I said, ‘This is the hour when the place is always full of women and children – it’s the shopping hour. Why choose that of all hours?’

  He said weakly, ‘There was to have been a parade.’

  ‘And you hoped to catch a few colonels. But the parade was cancelled yesterday, Pyle.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Didn’t know!’ I pushed him into a patch of blood … ‘You ought to be better informed.’ …

  ‘They should have called it off.’

  ‘And missed the fun?’ I asked him. ‘Do you expect General Thé to lose his demonstration? This is better than a parade. Women and children are news, and soldiers aren’t, in a war. This will hit the world’s Press. You’ve put General Thé on the map all right, Pyle. You’ve got the Third Force and National Democracy all over your right shoe. Go home to Phuong and tell her about your heroic dead – there are a few dozen less of her people to worry about.’15


  Fowler leaves Pyle standing in the square and goes in the direction of the cathedral. He considers that he had reason to be thankful:

  wasn’t Phuong alive? Hadn’t Phuong been ‘warned’? But what I remembered was the torso in the square, the baby on its mother’s lap. They had not been warned: they had not been sufficiently important. And if the parade had taken place would they not have been there just the same, out of curiosity, to see the soldiers, and hear the speakers, and throw the flowers? A two-hundred pound bomb does not discriminate. How many dead colonels justify a child’s or a trishaw driver’s death when you are building a national democratic front?16

  Unquestionably Greene was condemning the CIA for involving itself with a killer and providing that killer with weapons. Worse, he charged them with knowledge of what The was doing, and with conniving with him: ‘There mustn’t be any American casualties, must there?’17

  Greene never moved an inch from his conviction that the CIA were involved, though he took a different tack when he answered Liebling’s condemnation and argued in Ways of Escape in favour of American involvement:

  When my novel was eventually noticed in the New Yorker the reviewer condemned me for accusing my ‘best friends’ (the Americans) of murder since I had attributed to them the responsibility for the great explosion – far worse than the trivial bicycle bombs – in the main square of Saigon when many people lost their lives. But what are the facts, of which the reviewer needless to say was ignorant? 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. The photograph was reproduced in an American propaganda magazine published in Manila over the title ‘The work of Ho Chi Minh’, although General The had promptly and proudly claimed the bomb as his own. Who had supplied the material to a bandit who was fighting French, Caodaists and Communists?18