The Unquiet Englishman

by Richard Greene

  When the meeting moved to Greene’s room, Diederich observed an odd tableau: while discussing the fate of Archibald Dunn, Greene and Cayetano sat separated from each other by the bed, on which Greene had earlier laid the page proofs of Mark Amory’s edition of The Letters of Evelyn Waugh. It was the sort of thing that happened in Greene’s life; he had, after all, been handed a Tintin book in the bell tower at Phat Diem.

  Playing his weak hand, Greene appealed for a release purely on humanitarian grounds since Dunn’s wife was dying of cancer. There followed a brief silence during which the novelist searched his thoughts for some stronger grounds for appeal, then Cayetano assured him that things were ‘all right’ apart from a few points such as the ransom. Greene had the names of people in South Africa and elsewhere who were prepared to pay the money. This pleased Cayetano; he made note of the names, and seemed to warm up.

  Cayetano told him that he had some associates downstairs – these were representatives of the other rebel groups – might they come up? Greene knew that they were meeting in Panama to form a united front, so he agreed to meet them – they would need to agree to the release. Diederich was asked to leave the room for what became a two-hour session. One of the rebels could speak English; he acted as interpreter and gave a long propaganda speech. Greene had nothing more to offer them, except that he could write truthfully and dispel ‘disinformation’. While all this was going on, Diederich felt the vulnerability of their position: gunmen might burst in at any moment and kill everybody.

  At the end, Greene turned the tables and challenged Cayetano about the execution of peasants. The rebels exercised harsh military discipline in areas they controlled and regularly shot ‘ears’ – those thought to be informers – as well as anyone suspected of belonging to ORDEN.25 His answer was that the word peasants should be in inverted commas. He would not change his practices simply because a foreign novelist did not like them. When they emerged from the room, Diederich also asked Cayetano about the peasants and was told that those they executed belonged to ORDEN, ‘But we have recently changed that policy.’ This change of policy occurred between one room and another, but it hardly affected what happened in the field.

  Greene was happy: he believed that he had been given an assurance that Archibald Dunn would soon be free. It did not happen. On 8 October 1980, the guerrillas issued a communiqué that Dunn had been executed, so Greene felt he had been deceived by Cayetano. Bernard Diederich’s sources26 then passed on a quite different story that the ambassador, already sick, had died in captivity, rendering the whole business a shambles. In that scenario, the communiqué was an attempt to salvage a little value from the kidnapping; the guerrillas could pretend to have followed through on their threats. Jeremy Shearer inclined to this view, as did Greene.27

  Strangely enough, the story of the kidnapping of Archibald Dunn raised its head again in 2018, when his grandson launched a lawsuit against the president of El Salvador, Sánchez Cerén, alleging that he was one of Cayetano’s senior lieutenants and involved in the abduction, a charge he denies. The suit is merely for habeas corpus and intended to force him to reveal where the body is. The Supreme Court ordered Cerén to testify and his refusal to do so threatened to become a constitutional crisis in El Salvador.28 Cerén’s presidential term ended in June 2019, so presumably the action will proceed. For many years Cerén was protected by an amnesty law, which has since been declared unconstitutional, so prosecutors have opened an investigation into his role in the kidnapping of Dunn, and it seems likely that it will expand to include other kidnappings and deaths.29

  Having met Cayetano, Greene headed to Managua on 23 August to attend a great demonstration in honour of a highly successful literacy campaign in which five thousand high school students had been sent into the countryside to teach peasants to read. It was an awkward assignment for Greene as the Sandinistas had wanted Torrijos himself to come, but, perhaps insultingly, he sent the Englishman as his representative. The General was uneasy about the new government in Managua: they were doctrinaire and were provoking the United States unnecessarily. They had refused humanitarian aid from the Americans and were bringing in personnel from Cuba and Eastern Europe – the country was beginning to look like a client of the Soviet Union. Torrijos had sent soldiers and arms for the fight against Somoza, but could now see that the Sandinistas were making a trap for themselves and he did not care to join them inside it.30

  The demonstration was vast, with perhaps hundreds of thousands in attendance, and the speeches went on interminably, especially one by Humberto Ortega, the Defence Minister and brother of Daniel Ortega. Tomás Borge, the Interior Minister, did better, speaking for just five minutes. Although Greene made courtesy visits to Ernesto Cardenal and other ministers, his stay in Managua was mostly focused on Borge, and it did not go especially well. The minister was unhappy when Greene moved out of a remote VIP house in favour of Managua’s InterContinental Hotel, where, presumably, surveillance was more difficult. Later, his bodyguards took the cassette out of Diederich’s tape recorder, and when he protested to Borge he was told that he should not have been recording. Diederich would later wonder whether Borge thought them Torrijos’s spies. Greene was not told that the whole junta had assembled for a dinner with him, so missed one of the most important events planned on his itinerary, doubtless giving offence.31

  Back in Panama, Greene asked to see Bocas del Toro on the Atlantic coast, the furthest point reached by Christopher Columbus in his voyages; this was the same boyish impulse that had led him on an earlier visit to seek out Francis Drake’s grave. Accustomed to the General’s recklessness, the pilot flew through a dangerous rainstorm, unnerving the novelist, who would have preferred to go by car. Once the plane had landed, they walked through ankle-deep water and checked in to a hotel room equipped with just two iron bedsteads, a single chair, and a light that did not work. The next morning, the weather had cleared, and ‘Bocas was transformed’. In the little houses on stilts with balconies Greene saw something of Freetown, ‘a town I had loved’. He also had ideas, mistaken as it turned out, of how he might revive his Panamanian novel, ‘On the Way Back’.32

  Before going home, Greene had to turn down a whimsical request from the General. He wanted to dress the novelist in an officer’s uniform and take him for war games with the Americans at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. This amused Greene, but he wondered how convincing he would appear – a Panamanian military officer in his seventies with no Spanish and an English accent.33 He felt that it was all right to say no; after all, he would be back next year, and he would see the General then.

  And so it was that a year later Greene was getting ready for that journey when he heard that Omar Torrijos Herrera was missing, then confirmed as dead. On 31 July 1981, he had flown in a twin-engine de Havilland Otter towards the town of Coclesito in bad weather. Unable to see clearly, his experienced pilot and co-pilot aborted two attempts to land at a dirt airstrip, and as they attempted a third one of the wings hit a tree. The plane crashed into the side of a mountain, and the seven aboard, including Torrijos, were killed. It took a day for the bodies to be recovered.34

  Greene did not attend the state funeral, but wrote to Chuchu: ‘I really loved that man. What an extraordinary thing it was that a tiny country like Panama produced one of the great men of our time . . . I had already packed my bags to come to you last Wednesday and the shock left me staggered.’35 For his part, Chuchu believed the worst: he assumed it was a bomb and that Torrijos had been assassinated. He had no proof of this, yet Greene was inclined to believe him. In fact, conspiracy theories abounded. Some people claimed that Manuel Noriega, or another of the General’s rivals in the military, had arranged such a bomb. Others claimed that since Torrijos had lately befriended Edén Pastora, the Sandinistas had decided to kill him.

  Some believed it was the CIA, even though at the time of the funeral the American ambassador remarked that Torrijos ‘talked left, but acted conservatively’ and was coming to see the region
in terms the United States could accept.36 As Diederich later noted, people too easily dismissed an expert from the de Havilland firm who put the crash down to the weather.37 Torrijos had flown into too many rainstorms.

  73

  J’ACCUSE

  ‘Let me issue a warning to anyone who is tempted to settle for a peaceful life on what is called the Côte d’Azur. Avoid the region of Nice which is the preserve of some of the most criminal organisations in the South of France.’1 So opened J’Accuse, a pamphlet by Graham Greene with text in both English and French published by the Bodley Head on 27 May 1982. He went on to describe how organized crime, referred to in France as the milieu, was involved in the drug trade, had fought a war over casinos, was laundering money in the building industry, and was bound up with the Italian mafia. A survey of French newspapers of the time shows all this to have been well documented. Why was Graham Greene taking an interest in it?

  In March 1979, immediately after his cancer surgery, Greene learned that one of Yvonne’s daughters was getting a divorce from her husband, who ran a property company originally established with Jacques’s help.2 According to Greene’s pamphlet, the marriage began with a deception: the man had a long criminal history which he did not disclose. Once married, he began beating his wife, and in February 1979 the abuse reached its limit when, at a country hotel, she feared he would strangle her. Already the mother of one child, she was then four and a half months pregnant with her second. Divorce proceedings began, with the husband aggressively seeking control of the elder child; he purportedly said that he was not interested in the child, but wanted to control his ex-wife. He was able to obtain an extraordinary order from the court, requiring the woman to live within 500 metres of his residence. Moreover, Greene’s pamphlet asserted that a witness for the husband perjured himself, owing to threats.

  Abusing his visiting rights, the husband again threatened and assaulted his ex-wife. Greene made enquiries and found out about his hidden past. On 15 January 1980, he invited the man to his flat in Antibes, confronted him with the facts of his criminal record, and tried to negotiate a more reasonable set of arrangements for visiting the children. This got nowhere, and the conversation ended with the man raising his fists and declaring, ‘Je suis un mur’ – I am a wall. Greene smiled and responded, ‘Mais . . . je suis aussi un mur.’3 There was no question that Greene was now in danger, and he seems to have obtained a revolver, though he also thought often of Chuchu’s maxim, ‘A revolver is no defence.’4

  In early April 1980, according to J’Accuse, the man threatened to blow Yvonne’s brains out and tried to break into the Cloettas’ house. The next day, he attacked Jacques, but was driven off when his ex-wife threw a tear-gas bomb at him. He then absconded with the elder child. Despite all this, a court soon granted him provisional custody of that child. When Greene explained what had been going on to the sympathetic mayor of Antibes, the politician remarked: ‘But you are living one of your own books.’5

  In the months that followed a series of court decisions went mysteriously against the mother. Since the husband had boasted of belonging to the milieu, Greene concluded that it had pressured the magistrates and lawyers to favour one of its own. Greene’s frustration about what was happening to the Cloettas came out in his last meeting with Omar Torrijos, when he spoke of the situation in France as his reason not to go with him on the jaunt to Fort Bragg. Torrijos proposed first that the young woman and her children take refuge in Panama or that she remain in Europe with a new identity and a Panamanian passport. Greene wrote in his journal, ‘We spoke of killing’ the husband; Torrijos ‘produced the idea of a man whom he has helped with monopolies of fruit machines & wants me to see him through the G2 & discuss the possibilities’.6 Describing this conversation in Getting to Know the General, he adds, ‘I pretended that I would think the matter over.’7

  At the beginning of 1981, things seemed to be getting worse. He learned that the man had assaulted his current mistress and was proposing to sabotage Yvonne’s car. He described all this to Francis: ‘I thought that at last we had to go to the top. So I sent a letter to the Chancellor of the Legion [of Honour] returning my insignia & saying that I wanted to be free to speak out against the corruption of justice on the Côte. I sent a copy with another letter to Alain Peyrefitte, the Minister of Justice. Immediate action.’ The Grand Chancellor returned Greene’s insignia, which had been first bestowed in 1967, with the comradely suggestion that it might be useful in the fight. Peyrefitte, himself a well-known author, wrote Greene a letter and then called him: ‘he was sending his Inspector General & a colleague down the next day. Two extremely nice men. He had expected to stay 24 hours & stayed four days – he was quite overwhelmed by what he found. Now I think action will not be long delayed. Light at last at the end of the tunnel.’8

  Not yet. The investigation lost steam when Peyrefitte left office in May with the defeated President Giscard d’Estaing; however, Greene soon found allies within the administration of François Mitterrand. In November 1981, the Inspector General of the Ministry of the Interior assured Greene that a group of corrupt magistrates and policemen in Nice was under surveillance, and that they would one day break through their secrecy.9

  The newly elected Socialists had every reason to look into corruption there. Nice was controlled by the popular Gaullist mayor Jacques Médecin – he and his father, between them, held that post for a total of sixty-two years. Greene could see that the mayor was a scoundrel. Once the case became public, Médecin repeatedly denounced him for slandering his city. However, Greene, in the last year of his life, had the satisfaction of seeing the mayor flee to Uruguay rather than face prosecution. He was eventually brought home and jailed for malfeasance, embezzlement, and fraud.10

  For her own safety, Yvonne’s daughter moved with the baby to Switzerland and continued to fight for custody of her elder child.11 By early 1982, Greene decided it was time to throw a petrol bomb. He wrote a short account of the divorce, the domestic violence, and the litigation, asserting that the civic life of Nice was infected by corruption and by the workings of the milieu, and he named Jacques Médecin as part of it. He borrowed the title of Emile Zola’s J’Accuse, written in defence of Alfred Dreyfus, and ended the piece with a crescendo of accusations. He wanted it published as soon as possible, so Reinhardt sent it to his friend and trusted associate the printer Bill Hummerstone at the Stellar Press. Reinhardt’s colleague Euan Cameron recalls that no review copies were sent out before publication and that the initial print run went straight to France.12

  The ability to seize the attention of the world’s press was a weapon Graham Greene brought to what he called his war with the milieu. He did not much care how he might personally be harmed by publishing the pamphlet, and indeed some of the coverage hinted that he had gone potty. He hadn’t. He carried throughout his life a sense of failure in relationships and family, and saw this fight as one he could undertake for people he loved, even if there was a chance that he might take a bullet for his efforts.

  What he actually faced was four writs. Relying on France’s restrictive libel and privacy laws, the ex-husband quickly sued Graham Greene, the Bodley Head, and the Sunday Times, which had run excerpts from the pamphlet. At a hearing of which Greene and the other defendants were not notified, the court in Nice found that Greene had defamed the ex-husband, ordered the book destroyed13 and imposed financial penalties.14 But it was already too late: according to Euan Cameron, J’Accuse sold seventeen thousand copies in France within three weeks.15 Greene lodged appeals and managed to delay the suppression of the pamphlet for about two years.16

  The legal battles involving the marriage went on, and no one could feel real confidence about the outcome until July 1983, when Greene told Father Durán that he had ‘cause to rejoice’ as the Court of Cassation in Paris had overturned the original divorce and cleared the way for a new one.17 Eventually, the mother won custody of the elder child. However, the litigation hardly stopped in Greene’s lifetime
. As late as 1990, she had to pursue the ex-husband for unpaid child support of about thirty thousand francs, at a time when he was said to be driving a Maserati.18

  In the worst times, Greene relied heavily on the advice of a neighbour in Antibes. The Irish honorary consul, Pierre Joannon, was a historian and cultural writer, but also qualified as a lawyer. At certain moments, he reined in Greene’s suspicions about the milieu; he still believes that Nice has about the same problem of organized crime as any other large city and is not quite the infected place that Greene supposed it. He thought the abusive ex-husband was comparable to a character Greene had created: Pinkie from Brighton Rock. He likely did enjoy favours and protection from an old boys’ network, but one not nearly so active and sinister as Greene believed.19

  There is another side to what happened. It was very common at the time, and still is in some jurisdictions, for the police and the courts to treat domestic abuse with indifference. A woman lodging a complaint against her husband might just be ignored. Greene could see that Yvonne’s daughter had been subject to outrageous injustice and he put it down to a specific criminal conspiracy. That may have been only part of the truth – the part which his upbringing and experiences equipped him to see most clearly. It is also a sad fact of social welfare that violence in the home sometimes escalates all the way to murder before the victim is taken seriously.20 Looking at the J’Accuse episode from a distance of forty years, it shows that the civic life of Nice was corrupted not just by the milieu but by misogyny.