Although both received grants via CIA proprietaries or fake foundations, neither the International Rescue Committee nor the American Friends of Vietnam were front organizations in the sense that the Agency regularly funded and controlled them.42 That said, both were heavily implicated in the covert network that bound the U.S intelligence community to the émigré relief organizations of the early Cold War era. Some links were obvious, such as the presence of Wild Bill Donovan and future Director of Central Intelligence William J. Casey on the IRC’s Board of Directors. Others were less apparent—for example, a secret agreement reached by Joseph Buttinger and Samuel Adams, a Vietnam-based CIA officer operating under cover of the Foreign Operations Administration, that the IRC would take responsibility for projects with which the U.S.
government could not be openly associated; or Harold Oram’s acting as a regular reporting channel between Buttinger and Allen Dulles.43 Predictably, given his dominant role in Southeast Asian covert operations, the Vietnam Lobby also had ties to Edward Lansdale. He it was who first introduced Buttinger to Diem; he was in regular contact with the chair of the American Friends of Vietnam from March 1956, General John “Iron Mike” O’Daniel, with whom he had first visited Vietnam on a U.S. survey team in June 1953.44 There is even evidence that Lansdale invented the AFV in the first place: while Buttinger was visiting Saigon in the fall of 1954 he met an “American officer,” referred to in his diary only as “Mr.
X,” who advised him, “You must help get American public opinion on our side. Create a committee of friends of Vietnam.”45 Mr. X, historian Seth Jacobs writes, was “almost certainly” Colonel Lansdale.46
Perhaps the most remarkable instance of cooperation between
C AT H O L I C S
177
Lansdale and the American Friends of Vietnam involved a third party: movie director, producer, and screenwriter Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Early in 1956 Mankiewicz, whose filmography included such popular and critical successes as
During this trip, he met both with staff of the International Rescue Committee’s Vietnam office and Lansdale himself, who followed up the encounter with a long letter offering various pieces of advice about the project, chief of which was the suggestion that Mankiewicz depict an incident portrayed in Greene’s novel, the bombing of a Saigon square in 1952 by a Vietnamese associate of Lansdale’s, General Trinh Minh Thé (and attributed by Greene to the baleful influence of the American, Pyle), as “actually having been a Communist action.”47 On his return home, Mankiewicz contacted the chair of the AFV, Iron Mike O’Daniel, telling him that he intended “completely chang[ing] the anti-American attitude”
of Greene’s book. The U.S. ambassador to South Vietnam, Frederick Reinhardt, was sympathetic but skeptical, telling the American Friends of Vietnam’s Executive Committee: “If [the book] were to be edited into a state of complete unobjectionableness, there might be nothing left but the title and scenery.”48 This is, however, precisely what Mankiewicz proceeded to do, turning the American character into his hero and portraying Greene’s fictional alter ego and Pyle’s nemesis, the English journalist Fowler, as a communist stooge. Not only that, in an astonishing piece of casting apparently suggested by O’Daniel, the part of Pyle—in Greene’s novel, a callow Ivy League brahmin—was given to the World War II hero Audie Murphy, a fine soldier but limited actor, who reportedly distressed his English costar, Michael Redgrave, by storing a .45 and 500 rounds of ammunition in his Saigon hotel room to protect himself from Vietminh agents. “I figured if they were going to get me,” he explained, “I’d give them a good fight first.”49
The resulting movie was a travesty of Greene’s book, but Lansdale was delighted. After a premiere at Washington’s Playhouse Theater, the proceeds of which were donated to the AFV, the spy wrote his friend Diem describing “Mr. Mankiewicz’s ‘treatment’ of the story” as “an excellent change from Mr. Greene’s novel of despair,” and suggesting “that it will help win more friends for you and Vietnam in many places in the world where it is shown.”50 It was a brilliantly devious maneuver of postmodern
178
S A V I N G T H E W O R L D
literary complexity: by helping to rewrite a story featuring a character reputedly based on himself, Lansdale had transformed an anti-American tract into a cinematic apology for U.S. policy—and his own actions—in Vietnam. Greene himself was understandably furious. “Far was it from my mind, when I wrote