The Quiet American

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Anderson vividly tells the story of the CIA’s early years through the experiences of Frank Wisner, Michael Burke, Edward Lansdale, and Peter Sichel. I’ve read a lot about Wisner and Lansdale, a little about Burke (mostly dealing with Albania), and Sichel was a new figure to me. Still, if you’ve read about this subject before, you probably won’t find that many new revelations. He also covers J. Edgar Hoover and his distrust of the new Agency. Anderson faults the CIA’s political superiors for much of what ended up going wrong; he’s pretty critical of George Kennan, for example, who he calls a “two-faced weasel,” and of Eisenhower. The Quiet American’s reputation has only grown with time. As the United States waded ever deeper into an unpopular and devastating war, Greene’s book came to be seen as a masterpiece of anti-imperialism. Indeed, the very title has become a shorthand for a certain brand of American who is arrogantly unable to foresee the unintended consequences of his purportedly-good intentions. I shut my eyes and she was again the same as she used to be: she was the hiss of steam, the clink of a cup, she was a certain hour of the night, and the promise of rest.'

I stopped our trishaw outside the Chalet and said to Phuong, “Go in and find a table. I had better look after Pyle.” That was my first instinct – to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was greater need to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it; innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.” Anyway...This book recounts the final years of WW2 into the first decade or so of the Cold War through the interwoven stories of four CIA operatives: Edward Landsdale, Frank Wisner, Michael Burke, and Peter Sichel. Graham Greene portrays a U.S. official named Pyle as so blinded by American exceptionalism that he cannot see the calamities he brings upon the Vietnamese. It was adapted as two different movies, one in 1958 and another in 2002. The novel implicitly questions the foundations of growing American involvement in Vietnam in the 1950's and is unique in its exploration of the subject topic through the links among its three main characters - Fowler, Pyle and Phuong.Anderson doesn't just recount historical events here, though. The strongest aspect of the book is Anderson's evaluations of the lasting impacts of those decisions and actions by the CIA and past administrations: the rift between Republicans and Democrats and the mistrust of just about every other country in the world towards the US (excepting the UK perhaps)- to name just a few. It is a refreshing read and I highly recommend it to anyone curious about how the hell we ended up here. Thomas Fowler is a British journalist in his fifties who has been covering the French war in Vietnam for more than two years. He has become a very jaded and cynical man. He meets Alden Pyle and finds him naïve. Throughout the book Fowler is often caught in lies and sometimes there may be speculation that he is lying to himself. Fowler's relationship with Vietnamese woman Phuong often intensifies the conflict of the story, especially between Fowler and Pyle. For most readers with a passing interest in espionage, the operations of the CIA beginning in the 1950s are reasonably familiar. But that’s not the case of the Agency’s work in the years immediately following World War II. Scott Anderson corrects that gap in The Quiet Americans, an illuminating account of four veterans of the wartime OSS who rose to positions of prominence in the new agency that came into existence in 1947.

It is quite possible that Greene has been given a bit too much credit for predicting the events to come. It is also debatable whether Pyle and his idealism is really a good stand-in for Vietnam-Era America. That is to say, there is a lot of evidence showing that the involvement of the United States in Vietnam, and its stubbornness in refusing to leave, was driven by factors other than a good faith belief that a radical paradigm change was likely. She's no child. She is tougher than you'll ever be. Do you know the kind of polish that doesn't take scratches? That's Phuong. She can survive a dozen of us. She'll get old, that's all. She'll suffer from childbirth and hunger and cold and rheumatism, but she'll never suffer like we do from thought, obsession-she won't scratch, she'll only decay." A few days after his adventure at the fort, Fowler has been discharged from the hospital with a pronounced limp. He reunites with Phuong, who informs him that he’s received a telegram from his wife. In the telegram, Helen tells Fowler that she refuses to grant him a divorce, and that she suspects he’ll get tired of Phuong soon enough. Fowler smokes opium with Phuong, and lies to her, saying that Helen has agreed to the divorce. Why indeed? "We are fools," I said, "when we love. I was terrified of losing her. I thought I saw her changing – I don't know if she really was, but I couldn't bear the uncertainty any longer. I ran towards the finish just as a coward runs towards the enemy and wins a medal. I wanted to get death over." The book uses Greene's experiences as a war correspondent for The Times and Le Figaro in French Indochina 1951–1954.

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I've also immersed myself in the practical side of the industry, gaining hands-on experience in various aspects of movie production. This is something of a throwaway moment, ancillary to the central plot, yet Greene imbues it with meaning. This is a book that would reward a reread, I think. It's so dense with names, dates, references, that it can be hard to follow, at times, at least for someone like me who went into it with a pretty superficial understanding of the Cold War. Even so, I learned a lot this first time around -- both about the (oft misguided) larger political forces of the time and a ton of delightful (but also disturbing) details, like the involvement of the CIA's covert operations branch, the OPC, in the founding of the Paris Review. The Quiet American, the Ugly American' Fontenot, Gregory". Military Review. Archived from the original on 29 July 2019 . Retrieved 29 July 2019. An officer in the US Air Force who later worked for the CIA, Edward Lansdale (1908-87) gained fame in the early 1950s for his collaboration with Philippine President Ramon Magsaysay in crushing the Huk insurgency. It was during that experience that Lansdale pioneered the techniques of counterinsurgency and psychological warfare that he later brought to bear in South Viernam with Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem.