This is a weak argument. This was the day of home-made bombs and it was as true for the Americans as it was to anyone living in Saigon at the time, ‘to be wary; to be always afraid; to be alert’.19 Photographers, obsessed with getting a scoop, might well have been in the square – do newspaper photographers ever relinquish the camera except in sleep? Grenade attacks and assassinations took place in that area, often in broad daylight, and Life was renowned for scooping the opposition and taking photographs that other magazines were unable to. As Tom Peck said, ‘but Life had a reputation for being “Johnny on the spot” when a newsworthy event occurred’.
In fact, the photograph of the trishaw driver was not originally a Life photograph, though it appeared there. The photographs were taken by a Vietnamese photographer. He always carried his camera and when the bomb exploded in front of his eyes he took the photographs, for obvious commercial reasons. Both Charles Baker and Tom Peck were able to buy their own copies the next day: they were on sale. Life described the scene more fully than Greene did:
This devastation-filled street scene is the usually placid Place du Théâtre in Saigon. At 11 o’clock [Greene in his novel puts the explosion ahead by one hour] … a powerful bomb planted by Vietminh 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.20
Initially the authorities thought that the bomb was the work of the Vietminh. For days the Vietminh had been broadcasting that that day was the first anniversary of the death of On, a student who had been killed in a demonstration in Saigon. Calling Saigon an ‘occupied zone’, they asked supporters to make it a ‘day of hatred’. Ambassador Heath was troubled by the explosion because the Vietminh had not used these tactics before. He wrote to the American Secretary of State: ‘While feat selected is less exhibition strength than of VM willingness indulge in cowardly and brutal acts of terrorism, exploit was carried out with grim efficiency and will undoubtedly be heralded as Commie triumph.’21 Colonel Thé’s claim that it was his handiwork was therefore first thought to be an idle boast.
Greene, in Ways of Escape, offered proof – to the extent that proof can ever be offered when secret organisations are involved. It is clear that Greene thought the CIA were involved in this particular explosion:
There was certainly evidence of contacts between the American services and General The. A jeep with the bodies of two American women was found by a French rubber planter on the route to the sacred mountain [where General The had his hideout] – presumably they had been killed by the Vietminh, but what were they doing on the plantation? The bodies were promptly collected by the American Embassy, and nothing more was heard of the incident. Not a word appeared in the Press.22
This seems an odd story, but when I checked it out with American Intelligence, they confirmed that Greene’s comments were accurate – two American women were murdered, though why remains a mystery.
The next incident Greene uses to indicate that the CIA were up to ‘dirty tricks’ is more intriguing and no one in Washington would recently admit to this strange tale: ‘An American consul was arrested late at night on the bridge to Dakow (where Pyle in my novel lost his life) carrying plastic bombs in his car. Again the incident was hushed up for diplomatic reasons.’23
CIA contacts cast serious doubts on the authenticity of this story. This supposed incident of Greene’s allowed him to enlarge upon an American consul being arrested, presumably by the French authorities, for carrying plastic bombs (it is Pyle who provides the plastic explosive that leads to the devastation in the square). But Greene himself doubted the information the first time he was told. It came from his friend Trevor Wilson, who told Greene his source was impeccable – the French commander-in-chief, General Salan. Greene followed it up after Salan had left Hanoi and he and Wilson flew out to Paris. Salan was adamant. His information was genuine. Greene never stated his source publicly, but he referred to it in a letter to Catherine Walston, written on his fifty-second birthday, 2 October 1956:
I had an interesting visit to General Salan, the ex-c. in c. Indo-China. He once arrested a U.S. Vice-Consul in the act of carrying plastic – an answer to one’s questions. He said from personal experience I had got the native girl’s character [Phuong] absolutely right.24
But could there be any truth in the allegations: was American Intelligence in contact with Thé before 1954 when Colonel Lansdale befriended him? Did the French get it right this time or was their source suspect (secret informers sometimes are)? The only information comes from a telegram Donald Heath sent to the State Department describing some documents obtained from a Cao Dai sympathiser, a French official in the commissariat who for money handed over French secrets to the Cao Dai: ‘Some of the documents’, wrote Ambassador Heath, ‘seem suspect.’ Some Heath suspected were true: ‘we have to judge ourselves which we can believe in’. The French of course were afraid of the Americans and believed that they had their own scenario for the future. Certainly from documents which came into the American legation’s hands, the French believed the Americans were in touch with Thé and that legation officers had certain leading Vietnamese in their pay:
It suggests Fr Mil operations against Thé, but warns of danger because The real natlist. It expresses fear that reaction wld provide US with opportunity strengthen hold on country and states that Tran Van Tuyen, Tran Van An and Nguyen Huu Tri are Amer agents. Finally, it accuses The of responsibility for Ja 9 explosions and claims explosive devices were provided by US.25
Leaving aside the truth of these remarks, and Heath does not comment on the truth or falsity of them in his report, we must assume that these comments are indirectly taken from the French Sûreté. If the Sûreté’s judgment was accepted by French officials (with whom Greene had good relations), and perhaps by General Salan himself, then Greene would feel that he could use such remarks as truth in his novel. Assuming that contact between Thé and the CIA took place, that the CIA provided the explosive devices, and that Greene had been told of these facts by the French, but was asked not to divulge this information in any public way, then surely Greene would speak as here – as if he knew more than he was able to say: simply telling the unrelated story of some consul picked up with plastic bombs in his car and omitting private statements made to him by the Sûreté and Salan.
Still assuming for the moment that the CIA did provide The with explosives and did co-manage the terrorist activity (as in the novel), then Greene’s reasoning is strange for it begs the question of who else could have helped The but the CIA. However, there is another possibility. The was an inventive man who hated the French, who from a certain perspective had heroic qualities. He could well have acted on his own initiative. He had a strong desire to be original, and in the bomb explosions he was, for usual terrorist activity by the Vietminh in Saigon amounted to grenades thrown from a bicycle or the periodic assassination of those working for the French. There was no need for Greene to opt for a conspiratorial view of the world, though as a one-time intelligence officer, it is perhaps understandable that he might do so.
Pyle’s warning to Phuong not to be in the milk bar in the squarefn1 and that Americans were to be away from the area no later than eleven twenty-five is shocking, but if one part of the scheme is true (that it was the Americans who gave the explosives to the terrorist The) then it is probable that the other part is also. Yet as someone who knew Greene and also lived in Saigon at this time said, ‘This was a war zone and there were explosives all over the place. Thé could have gotten them almost anywhere.’26 The could have scavenged for the bomb parts and, as Greene reported about the Cao Dai, made his own weapons. ‘[The Cao Dai had] its own primitiv
e arsenal … mortars are fabricated from old exhaust pipes,’ he wrote in Paris Match, and in the novel he came back to this point when Fowler tells Pyle: ‘They know enough to turn your exhaust pipe into a mortar. I believe Buicks make the best mortars.’27
I checked security legation correspondence from Saigon to Washington to see if any Americans were in the vicinity of the bomb explosion in order to test Greene’s statement in The Quiet American that ‘there mustn’t be any American casualties’.28 The following security telegram from the legation was written the day after the explosion (10 January 1952):
No US citizens or employees injured in yesterday’s explosions downtown Saigon tho several escapes seem providential. Wife and infant son of NA Killen were in part across from Catinat blast site only few minutes earlier; wife of FSO Leonhart drove from parking area where charge was placed within five minutes of explosion; wife of V.C. Baker was in Indian shop across street at time of blast, had presence mind to fall to floor behind counter (shop was damaged).
Nancy Baker, who seemed to be the nearest to danger and therefore most knowledgeable about the event, said:
I had missed being in the square by a minute, leaving it and going into the rue Catinat. Just as you entered rue Catinat, some thirty yards away from the square where the massive explosion took place I looked into a fabric store window, went in. An Indian clerk came up to me to speak and the bomb went off. We leaped under a wooden table. I thought at first it was an aerial attack. I was in shock and rather frightened. It went off exactly at 11 o’clock. I had a six month old baby, my first. I was afraid.29
Some years later, when in Bangkok, Nancy sat next to Tran Van Dinh, a Vietnamese public relations officer, at a dinner. Tran Van Dinh, having read The Quiet American, said that the Americans had alerted the clerks and secretaries to leave the area before the explosion. ‘I got quite agitated. I said that this was a most inaccurate account. I said it could not be true else I wouldn’t have been in the area.’ Charles Baker then spoke up: ‘I was post security officer in Saigon and my job would have been to alert people of the danger. I was only married a year and I had this young baby. If I had heard I would have most certainly warned my wife to stay indoors that day.’30 And Americans and French needed to be vigilant, as a note in the New York Times in February 1952 shows:
The United States Legation here today warned all the city’s American residents that the Vietminh Communist rebels were planning demonstrations here tomorrow against the French and Americans. The legation advised them to be on the look-out for bomb throwers. There are 300 Americans in Saigon.31
Edmund Gullion was adamant that neither the legation nor the CIA had any dealings with The at this time: ‘The idea of an independent force springing out of the rice paddies was not something that we were really concerned with. There were disaffected people, and people like Diem who held themselves aloof from the French for a long time and we thought they were a more likely independent force.’32 A CIA agent told me, quite categorically, ‘To my knowledge no single agency official was – at that time [emphasis added] – in contact with Colonel Thé,’ and he added: ‘And I would know.’
* * *
fn1 The milk bar was in fact in the rue Catinat half a block away from the square. Phuong would have heard the report of the explosion: she would not have been in any personal danger.
PART 6
To America with Love
Greene on stage with Eric Portman and Dorothy Tutin during rehearsals for The Living Room
30
Visa Not for Sale
All claim to special righteousness awakens in me that scorn and anger from which a philosophical mind should be free.
– JOSEPH CONRAD
CHRISTOPHER SYKES, EVELYN Waugh’s biographer, recorded a meeting in the autumn of 1953 in White’s club between Waugh and a number of friends, one of whom was Greene. It was at the time of Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist campaign. Greene was planning to go to the United States and was ‘in a state of indignation’. McCarthy’s informers had found out that Greene had been a member of the communist party and as a result he had been denied a visa:
Graham fulminated against this injustice … ending up by saying, ‘Anyway it’s given me an idea for a political novel. It will be fun to write about politics for a change, and not always about God.’ … ‘Oh’ [Waugh] responded on his high note, ‘I wouldn’t give up writing about God at this stage if I was you. It would be like P.G. Wodehouse dropping Jeeves half-way through the Wooster series.’1
McCarthy’s informers (it was the US Customs and Excise which formally denied Greene his visa) discovered that he had been a member of a proscribed organisation because Greene deliberately gave out the information to test the McCarran Act.2 He first let it be known that he had been a member of a proscribed organisation when a nineteen-year-old student at Oxford. His picture was on the front cover of Time for the issue of 29 October 1951. Greene is looking pensive. Above his head and in the left-hand corner is a Catholic cross (very small); beneath his picture is the legend: ‘NOVELIST GRAHAM GREENE: Adultery can lead to sainthood.’ In the article (The End of the Affair was being reviewed) Greene released the information that as a prank at Oxford he had been a dues-paying member of the communist party for six weeks. ‘When he found that party membership would not get him a free trip to Moscow, he dropped out.’3
Greene explained that these facts had not been ‘cleverly unearthed’ by the CIA but had been disclosed ‘rather naïvely’ by himself: ‘the First Secretary of the American Embassy in Brussels, where I happened to be for a debate with François Mauriac … told me that the State Department were anxious for cases which expose the absurdity of the Act. So I mentioned my past to a Time correspondent. The plastic curtain fell immediately and was not lifted again until John Kennedy was President.’4
A confidential letter dealing with the question of Greene’s communist membership was sent by air pouch by Robert McClintock, Chargé d’Affaires in Brussels. It said that Greene had ‘lectured last night [30 October 1950] in Brussels on the subject of the “Paradoxes of Christianity”. He is a zealous convert to Catholicism and could not very well today be regarded as a Communist or a totalitarian.’ However, he had proffered the information that he had been a probationary member of the communist party for three months (actually no more than six weeks). Robert McClintock told Greene that the Department of State was applying the Internal Security Act of 1950 as it was written: ‘However, I suggested that, if Mr. Greene should wish to become a cause célèbre, I should be glad to take his application for a visa.’ He added: ‘This invitation will probably not be accepted since Mr. Greene is leaving the end of this month for Kuala Lumpur where his young brother, whom he termed as a “stripling of about 40”, is head of the Political Warfare Section of the British Forces fighting Communists in Malaya.’5 Greene, as we know, went on to Malaya and then to Vietnam and was unable to visit America until 1952 during Joe McCarthy’s rise to prominence. Testing the waters in 1948 would not have appealed to Greene, it would have been too safe; but by 1952 it had become a battle worth fighting, a move from the quiet to the active sector of the line.
In his view the McCarran Act’s blanket exclusion of all alien communists from the United States was fatuous. Philosophers like Michael Polyanin, novelists like Alberto Moravia and the anti-communist Arthur Koestler (whose masterpiece Darkness at Noon surely has us all in his debt), were all at different times excluded.
Greene wished to place himself under the ban imposed by the McCarran Act because many ‘were excluded by this Act and were unable in their anonymity and poverty to bring their case before the Attorney-General … I applied for a visa because I was in a position to secure a measure of publicity against McCarthy and McCarran.’6
Greene’s visa problems began while in Singapore. He wrote in his journal: ‘January 14, 1952: French Consulate for transit visa & Am. Consulate. Great difficulty about Am. visa.’ The difficulties persisted:
Saigon:
Jan. 22. Tuesday: Long morning at American Legation with Getz & the Minister Heath, who are trying to deal with my visa problem.
Saigon: Jan. 25. Friday: No Visa news.
Saigon: Jan 27. Cable from Life that makes one decide to wait on a little for American visa.
Saigon: Jan 29 Tuesday. Tea with Bervals. Feeling pretty low. No sign of Am. visa.
On 1 February Greene lunched with Graham Jenkins of Reuters and had drinks with ‘noisy Am correspondents & concocted news story on unobtainable visa’. Two days later, a short piece appeared in the New York Times and from there spread across the world. The New York Times’s article was headlined: ‘Graham Greene Visa Held Up for Inquiry’, and went on to say that Greene’s entry visa into the United States was under investigation by the State and Justice Departments ‘in conformity with the requirements of the Internal Security (McCarran) Act; that the 47-year-old author had applied for a visa in Saigon; and that the authorities in Washington thought the case merited further attention’. The McCarran Act automatically barred visas to anyone who had been a member of any subversive group, such as the communist or Nazi parties.
Greene’s American publisher, Harold Guinzburg, was concerned about his not being able to visit the United States, and sent a telegram to the Majestic hotel, Saigon: ‘HOPE YOU WONT ALLOW TECHNICALITY OF A STUPID LAW KEEP YOU FROM AMERICAN VISIT. WOULD LOVE SEE YOU HERE GREETINGS.’7 But it was too early to expect a relaxation of the McCarran Act while McCarthy flourished; officials were afraid of being labelled ‘sympathisers’.
The Life of Graham Greene (1939-1955) Page 55
