The Spy Who Loved Us_ The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game ( PDFDrive )

The Spy Who Loved Us 91
supporting role and the Department of State almost in total
eclipse.” Prouty describes how Lansdale met with the Cao Dai
warlord Trinh Minh Thé in his mountain hideout. He enlisted
Thé’s support by making him a brigadier general in the Vietnamese
army and depositing in his church collection box a cool
three million, six hundred thousand dollars. Prouty ends by
characterizing his former boss as the leader of “a band of
superterrorists.”
Lansdale was the model for Colonel Edwin Barnum Hillandale
in The Ugly American (1958) and for Colonel Lionel
Teryman in Jean Larteguy’s Le Mal Jaune (Yellow Fever) (1965).
Most people mistake Lansdale as the model for another fictional
character, Alden Pyle in The Quiet American. Graham
Greene steadfastly maintained that Pyle was not based on
Lansdale, but Lansdale, with the flair of an advertising man who
knows that there is no such thing as bad publicity, succeeded
in claiming the role as his own. He wrote himself into Hollywood
director Joseph Mankiewicz’s film script of The Quiet
American, and he helped produce what Greene considered
an act of cinematic treachery.
After buying film rights to The Quiet American, Mankiewicz
visited Vietnam in 1956 to scout locations. He met Lansdale in
Saigon and solicited his advice on the script. The U.S. State Department
denied Mankiewicz permission to film in Vietnam
on the grounds that Graham Greene was a suspected Communist,
and only after Lansdale intervened and began shaping
the movie to his own ends did the project get approved.
As the script progressed, Mankiewicz wrote to Lansdale, inquiring
about the explosion in front of the Continental Hotel on
January 9, 1952. Lansdale said the blast was caused by twenty
kilos of French melenite (plastique) placed in the trunk of a Citroen
15 CV and detonated by a timing device. The bomb killed
a dozen people and wounded twice that many. It would have
killed scores more, but its intended target, a parade of French
troops being rotated back to France, had been canceled.