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

The Spy Who Loved Us 55
ing World War II. Then he came out to Indochina to cover
the war. While he was in Asia, smoking opium and pretending
to be a journalist, the Deuxième Bureau assured us he was a
secret agent in MI6, British intelligence. We were also ordered
to watch very closely anyone who worked for the CIA.
“One day Graham Greene came to the post office to file a
story. His report was placed on my desk. It was a long report.
‘What do I do with this?’ I asked my supervisor. ‘You have to be
very careful,’ he said. ‘If there are any words you are not sure
about, just cross them out. Your English isn’t very good, but
there’s nothing he can do about it. He can’t argue with you. So
just go ahead and cross out the words. Mark it up and then give
it to the man who types the telegram. They never give him a
chance to argue anyway.
“To file a good story, you have to use a pigeon,” An says, referring
to a courier who flies dispatches out of the country and
files them in Hong Kong or Singapore. “Greene himself wrote
a story about how he used to pigeon articles out of Vietnam for
David Chipp, the Reuters correspondent in Indochina. I later
worked under David Chipp when he became chief of Reuters
in Southeast Asia. When I talked to him about this, he told me
that he was the one who pigeoned articles out of Vietnam for
Graham Greene.
“When Greene was in Saigon he smoked a lot of opium,” An
says. “He got it from Mathieu Franchini at the Continental
Hotel. It wasn’t illegal to smoke opium back then. I never met
Graham Greene. I saw him at the post office or down at the
Continental, having an aperitif on the terrace, but if I had
started talking to him, I would have got in trouble with the
French military security, the OR, the Office des Renseignements.
These people were planted everywhere.”
Aside from censoring Greene’s dispatches, An also witnessed
the event that provided the centerpiece for The Quiet American,
which was published in England in 1955 and in the United
States a year later. “I was on my way home from the customs