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

92 THOMAS A. BASS
Lansdale confirmed that the bombing was the work of
General Thé, the Cao Dai commander. Thé got his melenite
from the French Expeditionary Corps, which organized and
equipped Vietnam’s private armies, said Lansdale. (Greene
maintained that Thé got his explosives from the Americans,
which seems a more likely story, since his intended target was
a parade of French soldiers.) In another version of the story,
which Lansdale tells Mankiewicz in a postscript to his letter,
General Thé had picked up a couple of dud bombs dropped
on him by the French and wired them into the gas tanks of two
stolen cars.
Although General Thé claimed credit for the bombing in a
radio broadcast, the Communists were blamed for it. “I doubt
if more than one or two Vietnamese now alive know the real
truth of the matter, and they certainly aren’t going to tell it
to anyone, even a ‘quiet’ American,” Lansdale wrote to
Mankiewicz. “The French and others have put reports together
and have concluded that Thé did it. Since General Thé is quite
a national hero for his fight against the Binh Xuyen in 1955, and
in keeping with your treatment of this actually having been a
Communist action, I’d suggest that you just go right ahead and
let it be finally revealed that the Communists did it after all,
even to faking the radio broadcast (which would have been
easy to do).”
With its American protagonist—played by war hero Audie
Murphy—portrayed as a good guy fighting Communist perfidy,
Mankiewicz’s film had one huge fan: Edward Lansdale. On
the day he saw it, Lansdale dashed off a note to President Diem,
telling him that the movie offered “an excellent change from Mr.
Greene’s novel of despair,” one that would “win more friends for
you and Vietnam in many places in the world where it is shown.”
In spite of the CIA’s efforts to promote it, the film was a commercial
and critical flop. It did succeed, though, in associating
Lansdale with Greene’s novel—a confusion he was glad to cultivate,
or reveal, as Lansdale would say.