The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955)

by Norman Sherry

  Speaking of Pyle, Fowler says: ‘What’s the good? he’ll always be innocent, you can’t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. All you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.’24 There is a fearful price to pay for Pyle’s righteous innocence, an innocence linked with power, the power of America. In Greene’s view, the innocent do harm to the innocent: ‘Is there any solution here the West can offer?’ he wrote in his Indo-China diary, and added, ‘the bar tonight was loud with innocent American voices, and that was the worst disquiet’.

  * * *

  fn1 When Greene interviewed President Diem, he asked him why he had allowed Thé to return when he was responsible for killing so many of his own people. Greene recalled that Diem burst into peals of laughter and said: ‘Peut-être, peut-être.’12

  34

  The Honourable Correspondent and the Dishonourable Friend

  Trust not him with your secrets, who when left alone in your room, turns over your papers.

  – JOHANN KASPER LAVATER

  SHORTLY AFTER GREENE’S arrival in Vietnam, the chief of the Sûreté in Vietnam brought de Lattre a secret report on Greene. The report indicated that Greene’s brother Hugh was the ‘patron’ of the Secret Services in Malaya and that Greene was an ‘honourable correspondent’: in the vocabulary of espionage, a spy with a cover.1 De Lattre’s suspicions were confirmed.

  Greene first became aware of a certain coolness in de Lattre’s attitude upon his return to Vietnam in October 1951. Before, de Lattre had treated Greene as an honoured guest, presenting him with a shoulder-flash of the First French Army (which de Lattre had commanded) and inviting him to a reunion of his old comrades. But now Greene’s friend Trevor Wilson had been ordered out of the country and Greene’s relationship with de Lattre had deteriorated. By this time de Lattre had lost his only son and ‘his rhetoric of hope’, as Greene put it, was wearing thin:

  Now in a strange sick manner he linked the death of his son with my visit to Phat Diem and the fact that both Trevor Wilson and I were Catholics. He had shifted on to us, in his poor guilt-ridden mind, the responsibility for his son’s death (he had sent his son to join a Vietnamese battalion to break up his relationship with a Vietnamese girl who was a former mistress of the Emperor). He reported to the Foreign Office that Trevor Wilson, who had been decorated for his services to France during the war, was no longer persona grata. Trevor was thrown out of Indo-China, and the Foreign Office lost a remarkable Consul and the French a great friend of their country. He had already gone when I returned to Hanoi, but he was allowed to come back for two weeks to pack up his effects.2

  The head of the Sûreté went even further and told de Lattre that ‘Graham Greene has come here with precise instructions.’ To which de Lattre responded: ‘All these English, they’re too much! It isn’t sufficient to have a consul who’s in the Secret Service, they even send me their novelists as agents and Catholic novelists into the bargain.’3

  De Lattre was convinced that Trevor Wilson had dual roles, one as British consul in Hanoi and the other as a ‘spy’ for the British Government. Wilson’s opposite number in the CIA in Hanoi told me there was no doubt about this:

  Trevor Wilson was very shrewd – always on the look out for information and he hired a British girl in Hanoi married to a French foreign legion officer to be his office manager and this was another source of information for Trevor. There is no question that Trevor was doing two jobs. On the one hand he had his Consular diplomatic job. On the other he was SIS, visiting Maurice Oldfield his chief in Singapore. Oldfield was in charge of Trevor because he was the operational head [controller of MI6 then located in Singapore] who later became head of SIS in London – C himself.4

  According to Greene, suspicion peaked when he received a telegram from Wilson announcing his imminent arrival from Paris: ‘It was’, said Greene, ‘his eccentric economy never unnecessarily to sign a telegram, but obviously to the censorship this was a deliberate attempt to deceive.’5 (It is probable that Wilson was trying to avoid recognition by not signing his telegram, for I have viewed copies of other telegrams Wilson sent to Greene and in every case they are signed: Greene was protecting his friend here.)

  Greene guessed matters were coming to a head when, through the head of the Sûreté, he was commanded to have lunch with de Lattre. During the meal nothing was said, but the general came over to him afterwards saying, ‘Le pauvre Graham Greene’, and because de Lattre had not found time to speak to Greene he invited him back to a cocktail party and dinner the same evening. Greene, with commendable restraint, went back a second time to a party that went on and on, with musical entertainment by a soldiers’ choir. He had heard the rumours that de Lattre would be leaving Hanoi, and, more ominously for France’s future in Vietnam, would not return.

  If I had known he was a dying man perhaps I would have perceived in him again the hero I had met a year before. Now he seemed only the general whose speeches were too long, whose magic had faded … a dying flame looks as if it had never been anything but smoke.

  At ten o’clock the singing stopped and the general turned to me. ‘And now, Graham Greene, why are you here?’ His broken English had an abrupt boastful quality he did not intend. I said, ‘I have told you already. I am writing an article for Life.’

  ‘I understand you were in the Intelligence Service in the war. For three years.’

  I explained to the general that under National Service we did not pick our job – nor continue it when the war was over.

  ‘I understand that no one ever leaves the British Secret Service.’

  ‘That may be true of the Deuxième Bureau,’ I said, ‘it is not true with us.’ A servant announced dinner.

  I sat next to the general and we talked polite small talk. Madame de Lattre eyed me sternly – I had disturbed the peace of a sick man whom she loved, on his last night in Hanoi, the scene of his triumph and his failure. Even though I was unaware how sick he was, I felt a meanness in myself. He deserved better company.6

  When they rose from the table Greene asked de Lattre if he might see him alone. When the other guests left, which was not until one in the morning, the general sent for Greene to come to his study:

  I had prepared in my mind what I thought was a clear narration, which included even the amount I was being paid by Life for my article. He heard me out and then expressed his satisfaction with some grandiloquence (but that was his way). ‘I have told the Sûreté, Graham Greene is my friend. I do not believe what you say about him. Then they come again and tell me you have been here or there and I say, I do not believe, Graham Greene is my friend. And then again they come …’ He shook hands warmly, saying how glad he was to know that all was a mistake, but next day, before he left for Paris, his misgivings returned. I had received yet another dubious telegram, again unsigned – this time from my literary agent in Paris, ‘Your friend will arrive on Thursday. Dorothy under instruction from Philip.’

  The last sentence referred to my friend, Dorothy Glover … who had decided to become a Catholic, and Philip was Father Philip Caraman, the well-known London Jesuit, but it was obvious what the Sûreté made of it. ‘I knew he was a spy,’ de Lattre told one of his staff, before boarding his plane. ‘Why should anyone come to this war for four hundred dollars?’ I had forgotten how uncertain his English was – he had mislaid a zero.7

  In his journal, Greene recorded his feelings about his final interview with de Lattre: ‘Said he had taken my part against the police but was worried by reports they brought in. Accepted my word. But does he? Felt I had not defended T[revor] enough, but the prejudices there are too great.’8

  Wilson lost favour with de Lattre as a result of his contact with the bishop of Phat Diem, Monsignor Le Huu-Tu, who was outspokenly no friend of the French. Because Phat Diem was vulnerable to attacks by the Vietminh he had approached the French for weapons, but once they were in his hands he spoke from the safety of his cathedral against the French colonists: ‘I h
ave what I need for dealing with the French.’ He had also had considerable contact with the Vietminh and at one time (in 1946) had agreed to be Ho Chi Minh’s ‘Supreme’ adviser.

  De Lattre was anglophobic and was profoundly upset by the fact that Bishop Le Huu-Tu had singled out Wilson before an applauding crowd by saying ‘Long live the King of England’: it was the sons of France (including de Lattre’s own son) who were losing their lives in Vietnam, not the British. Indeed the French believed, according to my CIA sources, that Wilson encouraged the bishop’s antagonism towards the French: ‘Trevor was a very, very smart intelligence officer, as well as an important consul. He knew what was going on. He pushed too many buttons and he got into a jam with the French … He was out every night, to the bars, whatever was going on, parties, everywhere. That was his job if he was going to do it well and he did it well.’9

  The fact that Wilson was an ardent Catholic and knew the Catholic hierarchies at Phat Diem and Bui Chu was a matter of some political significance, for they were a law unto themselves and felt themselves to be separate from the French administration. Greene, through Wilson, also had close contact with Bishop Le Huu-Tu and interviewed him for Paris Match. The article brilliantly, and unexpectedly, described him as ‘an austere man with the face of a sad, meditative monkey’. This description at least should have pleased de Lattre, but it did not:

  De Lattre rages when he learns about all the ceremonies organized for that [secret] agent. He foams at the mouth when he is told about the length of the interviews between the bishop and the novelist: The Englishman had devoutly kissed his ring, the Englishman had taken communion, the Englishman had displayed his most emotional smile. It is finally that same Englishman who found the best noun, the unique, the true, the necessary noun, ‘monkey’ which had escaped Dannaud, [General] Cogny, and Goussault. That’s what it means to be a properly famous novelist.10

  Greene’s relationship with Wilson and consequently with the bishop of Phat Diem made him, in de Lattre’s eyes, guilty by association.

  There was much Intelligence interest in Phat Diem. The Catholics, an important political group in North Vietnam, were well organised: ‘They have the infrastructure: the churches are full of meeting places where you can meet clandestinely: they know how to operate: they know how to send messages securely: they are good spy potential … And the Catholics were the true Third Force in Vietnam.’11

  Both the CIA and the SIS were on a similar mission of assessment. Both wanted to know whether the French were trying to retain a colonial regime under a new form of colonialism – which the Belgians also tried later in the Congo. The Government would be local as would be the titular minister, but the Number One adviser would be French. ‘The British were very interested in this and needed information as to how it was going.’12 The Labour Government wanted to abdicate its colonial responsibilities, yet some of the trading companies had a strong desire to see the re-establishment of a colonial or pseudo-colonial regime.

  Wilson’s mission was not to try to influence de Lattre, but to inform the British Government what was happening. De Lattre in turn would have wished Wilson to be sympathetic to the French point of view and to influence American participation. However, Wilson was not sympathetic towards an excessive anti-colonialism, though neither did he hold the American belief that the communists were a monolithic block stretching through Indo-China ready to join forces with the Chinese.

  Indeed, the following anecdote about Greene and Wilson at one of de Lattre’s famous dinner parties reveals Wilson’s rather ‘undiplomatic’ summary of the political situation:

  The two men Greene and Wilson boozing together, would talk whole nights until dawn. One evening when they were supposed to dine, both of them, at de Lattre’s, the consul had already drunk one glass too many. When he was half drunk, which was a semipermanent state, he expressed what he was thinking and nothing could make him shut up, not even the furious face of the General. Wilson began telling him abominably scandalous things: ‘You are going to lose the war. The whole people is Vietminh. You are fighting against the entire people! With your mercenaries you are already condemned, you’re going to be defeated!’

  De Lattre knows very well that the job isn’t easy, but if it was child’s play, why did France call him? He was there to conquer and he believes that he WILL win. He has, at this point, no doubt at all. In any case, it will be the ‘Great Game’. It’s HE who will save Asia … not this ridiculous boozer, a John Bull boozer – a living wine skin pierced with eyes at the same time too lively and too bloodshot – treats him as if he belongs to the ridiculous lineage of all incapable, incompetent French generals … He says such things in front of his companion, this so called writer, of whom he is the mentor. He says such things before the whole entourage and even before Madame de Lattre. It’s intolerable!13

  It is probable that this drunken outburst by Wilson was the final straw for de Lattre and the cause of Wilson’s expulsion from the country.

  Once Wilson was ejected did Greene work for the SIS, even if on an informal basis, when he was in Vietnam? Was he, as the French reported, ‘a spy with a cover’ – an ‘honourable correspondent’? Evidence that Greene helped out the ‘old firm’ comes from the Sûreté in Vietnam and CIA agents who knew him there. My CIA source had no doubt that the file the Sûreté kept on Greene was accurate (he had been astonished by the depth and accuracy of the file amassed on his own activities): ‘And Trevor got kicked out, so that from then onwards Greene, who had been introduced to the political bishops by Trevor, took on part of that job [emphasis added].’14

  Wilson’s exile was not permanent. After de Lattre’s death, Wilson was allowed back into Vietnam, only this time under the cover of a leather goods distributor:

  Greene brought Trevor back in almost as his assistant. The French would all chuckle because they knew him thoroughly. They put a tail on them both and they watched them. But Graham was in effect giving a reverse cover to Trevor. The French wanted it to look right even though they knew it wasn’t right. When Graham went back, he was doing a short-term operational assignment because Trevor was gone.15

  So Greene was seeking information about the war, about political attitudes, and possible military and political outcomes as any good spy would do, but with the added oddity that His Majesty’s former consul was now Greene’s assistant.

  Greene was approached by the SIS prior to his second trip to Vietnam in October 1951.fn1 The initial contact was made through his friend Alexander Korda. Korda was no stranger to intrigue, having received a knighthood for Intelligence work done during the war. At the height of the blitz, when many of those who could afford to escape from London were doing so, Korda left London for America. From the perspective of the British people, the famous film mogul had ratted, gone to America – out of the war, out of the blitz, out of danger:

  [Churchill] instructed Alex to set up offices in New York and Los Angeles, and to link them to a worldwide motion picture corporation. These offices would exist for their own sake as a moneymaking enterprise of Alex Korda’s, but they would also serve as ‘cover’ for British agents working in what was then neutral America. American isolationists had made it difficult for British intelligence operatives to work freely in the United States, but a movie company offered unparalleled opportunities for concealing intelligence work, and Alex could even himself act as courier … It was made clear to him that certain risks were involved. The least of these was public criticism of his departure.16

  Korda continued to assist the SIS when he could and in the 1950s he was surveying Yugoslavian waters for the SIS while Greene was on Elsewhere. In Greene’s journal there is a direct reference to the SIS which is enlarged upon in an undated letter written to Catherine (autumn 1951). Greene told her that Korda had again asked him to join him on his yacht Elsewhere and added, ‘“The old firm” has asked Korda if I’d do a job for them. I don’t know what. K’s arranging a meeting when I get back from Evelyn [Waugh’s].’

>   On his second visit to Vietnam, from 23 October to 22 December 1951, (after having learnt from the ‘old firm’ through Korda what was expected of him) he mentioned in his journal one Doug Bollen. On Sunday 11 November he went on a picnic with Bollen and the Toppings to a grotto. In an undated letter to his mother, he wrote: ‘Yesterday I had a nice picnic in the country by a little pagoda among tombs with two old friends from the “old firm” [Donald Lancaster and John Taylor].’ He heard the news of the final bust up between Trevor and de Lattre from Doug Bollen:

  Later while changing Bollen turned up & told me about General & T[revor]. General wants to see me tomorrow. Under circs. B. thought it best not to be seen there with me so whole thing called off. Dinner alone with B … Very disturbed.17

  After his final meeting with General de Lattre, he wrote to Catherine: ‘depressed by the whole T. business. Wish I was back on Korda’s boat. Foolish to have left it when I did. Foolish to have come here.’18 However, the next day Wilson returned, having been allowed two weeks to pack. The Sûreté had both of them watched.

  If Greene was a ‘casual’ spy, then he was a man of many faces and he revealed other secret personalities beneath the personalities already revealed. Knowing of his continued relationship with the SIS, Greene’s overt anti-Americanism may be viewed from a different perspective and his curious friendship with the greatest double agent England produced, Kim Philby, may have served a special purpose.