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

The Spy Who Loved Us 57
lining the streets, waiting for the parade, when the bomb
went off. It shattered the windows in the café Givral and the
pharmacy next door. I watched as the police rushed in to help
the wounded.”
Except for its private army of several thousand soldiers,
the Cao Dai were a peculiar choice for American patronage. The
religion was founded in 1926 by a Vietnamese civil servant who
had been enlightened during a spiritualist séance. The Cao
Dai had a pope and female cardinals who presided over a holy
see, eighty kilometers northwest of Saigon. Greene described
the Cao Dai church as “a Walt Disney fantasia of the East,
[full of] dragons and snakes in Technicolor.” Represented by the
divine, all-seeing eye, the religion included among its saints
Joan of Arc, Descartes, Shakespeare, Pasteur, and Lenin.
Soon after its publication, An was given a copy of The Quiet
American by Mills C. Brandes, a CIA case officer in Saigon, who
would later serve, it appears, as chief of station in Thailand.
Brandes thought the book would help An learn English. “Many
Vietnamese believed this story about the Americans coming
to Vietnam and trying to set up the Cao Dai as a ‘third force,’”
An says. When The Quiet American was made into a movie, An
published a review of it. When the book was filmed for a second
time in 2001, An served as an adviser on the film and as the
model for one of its central characters—the Communist assassin
who kills CIA agent Alden Pyle.
To escape his “manic-depressive temperament,” Graham
Greene began traveling in Asia in 1950. He was covering the
Communist insurgency in Malaysia as a correspondent for Life
when he flew to Hanoi in January 1951 to visit an old friend who
was stationed there as British consul. Greene immediately fell
in love with Vietnam. He would return three more times to report
on the war and gather material for The Quiet American. As
Greene wrote in Ways of Escape, the second of his two autobiographies,
“In Indochina I drained a magic potion, a loving
cup which I have shared since with many retired colons and